


together we wait for silence

by ashes_and_ashes



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Graduation, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Muggle AU, Road Trip, Swim Team AU, Swimming AU, and must now deal with feelings, muggle!Draco, muggle!Harry, road trip au, that awkward moment when you take your best friend on a road trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 21:13:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29988903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashes_and_ashes/pseuds/ashes_and_ashes
Summary: Harry laughs, tilts his head back and swallows the last of the soda. It’s warm and flat, sugar sticking to his teeth. He runs his tongue over his lips and looks back towards Draco. “Don’t blame me when you drive us over the edge of a cliff.”Draco grins. “How could I? You’re here with me, aren’t you?”The click of the turn signal. The colours of the sky. The hum of the radio, near forgotten in the heat, forlorn notes and drifting voices.“Yeah,” Harry says. “I am.”~aka the combined swimming/road trip au that no one ever asked for and yet is now here. featuring pining, shitty families, vending machines, stargazing and the inherent sexual tension of racing your best friend in the ocean as the sun sets on an empty beach :)
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 22
Kudos: 75
Collections: Beautiful Prose





	together we wait for silence

**Author's Note:**

> hey! it's been ages since I've written anything, much less posted on ao3! this is an extraordinarily self-indulgent fic that I low-key pulled out of my ass and will now present to you!
> 
> thanks so much to Jo, Mia and Nat for giving me the courage to post this! you guys are the best <3
> 
> title is from Innocence by Madeon
> 
> come find me on tumblr @ashes-and-ashes!!

It starts with the steady rhythm of tires on the asphalt, the shuddering of the glass in their frames. The radio plays distantly in the background - something slow and sad, crackling with interference. Harry liked rap, twisted words and heavy bass, so different from the low voices and crooning songs Draco preferred. It somehow combined into this; a mix of electronic melodies and crooning vocals, a song none of them particularly liked but listened to anyway. The sun blurs in the distance, blue and red and gold, heat shimmering in the distance.

“Air-con?” Draco’s voice is rough, almost jolting in the near silence of the car. Time moves like syrup around them, the slow stretch of an afternoon fading into evening, a day that never seemed to end. He swallows against the dryness in his throat. 

“I’m good,” Harry says. The air-con never worked anyway, only scorching heat from plastic vents. The sky melts into shades of orange all around him. He props his hand on the window, twists his feet so they’re positioned under his legs. “Sprite?”

The bottle is practically empty, a small pool of liquid where Harry tilted the plastic towards him. Draco had stopped at a gas station nearly two hours ago - the bottle is the only thing left now, along with a handful of crumpled silvery wrappers. 

Draco shakes his head. Shadows from the clouds cast patterns across his face, tinted with the light of the dying sun. “Nah.” 

“You’re going to regret it,” Harry says. Draco spares him the briefest glance, one finger drumming absently on the wheel. “We have two hours left. You’ll crash.”

Draco makes a face at him, scrunched up eyes and down turned lips. “You drink it. Asshole.”

Harry laughs, tilts his head back and swallows the last of it. It’s warm and flat, sugar sticking to his teeth. He runs his tongue over his lips and looks back towards Draco. “Don’t blame me when you drive us over the edge of a cliff.” 

Draco grins. “How could I? You’re here with me, aren’t you?”

The click of the turn signal. The colours of the sky. The hum of the radio, near forgotten in the heat, forlorn notes and drifting voices. 

“Yeah,” Harry says. “I am.”

~

This is how it started.

It started with a sunset, like most stories do, a rusted ladder and a roof and the sun lighting up the sky in streaks of gold. It started with the summer after graduation, the fragile moment between growing up and letting go, the wind in Harry’s face and in his hair. It started with Draco leaning back, hands braced on the chilly concrete behind him, legs dangling over the edge. 

“Let's go on a trip,” Draco said, and sometimes Harry thinks he’ll never forget the smooth roll of his voice. 

They’ve been friends for years now, ever since Draco appeared at swim practice one day and was promptly yelled at for being five minutes late. Harry’s shared highs and lows with him - morning practices and midnight ferry rides, shaving in the bathroom before a meet, the echo of the pool doors opening at 6am on a Saturday morning. He’s seen Draco laugh after practice in the hot tub, hold back tears after missing the standards by a millisecond, smile after breaking the club record a month after. 

“Where?” Harry asked and Draco laughed. 

“Somewhere. Anywhere. A road trip.” 

If he closes his eyes he can almost imagine it. Suitcases in the back, windows halfway rolled down. An endless expanse of asphalt, stretching out into the distance.

Harry smiled, hard enough that his face hurts, hard enough that he forgot about the pain in his chest.

“Let's do it.”

~

He forces Draco to switch after he yawns for the third time, a stifled gasp behind the press of his palms. The sky is dark now, the radiance of the sun replaced with the gentler pinpricks of the stars. When Harry opens the van door the air smells like bush and desert. 

“My turn,” Harry tells him. The glow of the headlights shifts his face into sharp planes of grey. 

Draco casts him a confused look. His hands are still clenched tight around the edge of the steering wheel. When he releases his grip Harry spots lines from the leather cut into his palm, almost invisible in the darkness. 

“I’m fine to keep going,” he says.

Harry ignores him. He doesn’t bother to shut the passenger door, instead circling around to open Draco’s door instead. He watches as Draco slowly unfolds himself, all long legs and bony shoulders, his hood still pulled over his head despite the heat. He drops the keys into Harry’s palm.

The seat is warm when he slides in, when he pulls the lever under the seat and slides closer to the brakes. Draco’s half asleep when Harry finally cuts the lights on. 

“Told you,” he mutters under his breath. 

Draco grumbles something incomprehensible. Harry laughs. 

“Should have drank the Sprite.”

It’s not until he pulls back onto the road that Harry realizes Draco’s leaning against the door, the soft grey of Harry’s hoodie pillowed underneath his head. He’s barely illuminated - the dim glow of the buttons on the dashboard, the faint pinpricks of light from the stars spinning above them. One of his hands is splayed against the window, a ghostly outline in the darkness. Harry stares at the faint lines of his body and something impossibly fond lights in his chest. 

“What,” Draco grumbles, his face half-mashed into his arms. Then; “Oh. Shit, sorry. Do you not want me to…”

Harry turns away, fixes his eyes on the road. Breathes in and out, in and out. Shoves the small spark in his chest deep inside of him, mouth _friends_ with all the bitterness of a lie. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Harry says, and his voice is almost light enough that he believes it.

~

Draco’s asleep when Harry finally pulls into the parking lot in front of the motel. It’s almost clichéd - the neon glow of the signs, the line of windows and the balconies that stretched across the front. The car is filthy, dusty windscreens and bugs caught underneath the wipers.

Harry leaves Draco dozing in the car while he sorts out the room keys, in a foyer with linoleum floors and flickering fluorescent lights. The buzz of electricity fills his ears as he accepts the small pieces of plastic, scribbles his signature with a cheap pen, lets the door click shut behind him as he heads back towards the car. 

Draco’s only half-awake when he shuffles into the room. They both go through the motions - suitcases stacked in a corner, trash stuffed into the bin. Harry raids the vending machine while Draco takes a shower. He creates a pile of shiny plastic spread out across the covers of the bed. 

“Dinner,” Harry says when Draco steps out, and holds up a chocolate bar. Draco gives him a withering look, his head haloed by the curtain of steam and lit up by flickering lights. “It’s fancy. Like you.” 

“You’ve exhausted your white boy jokes for today,” he mutters tiredly. He’s in sweatpants and an old swimming shirt, the material thin enough that Harry can just make out the edges of his ribs through the cloth. 

Harry passes the bar to him, turned so that he can read the words printed across the front. _Plant based. Dairy free. Gluten free. No artificial flavors or preservatives._ “Bitch.”

He rolls his eyes. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. You think I believe you got a vegan chocolate bar from a shitty motel vending machine?” 

Harry shakes his head. “Gas station,” he says, referring to the one they passed nearly 6 hours ago. The bar is soft now, melted from too many hours in the heat. Draco’s hands brushes his as he reaches for it, fingers skimming the back of Harry’s hand. 

“Thanks,” he says, and his voice is rough, catching at the end.

Harry nods, offering him a small smile as he sweeps into the bathroom behind him. “Always.”

~

The hum of the mini fridge makes him want to scream.

There’s only one bed; they’ve piled the spare pillows in the middle between their bodies, high enough that a stray leg or arm couldn’t pass over through the middle. Harry can still feel him though, the dip in the mattress where Draco’s body lay against the bed. It’s too hot - the air-con is shitty, and he’s got the covers kicked off and tangled around his feet. 

Neon lights. Cars. The sound of footsteps in the room beside them; the walls are thin enough to hear every heavy step that the person next door to them made. Cutting through it all is the sound of steady breathing, the barest twitch of the covers.

“There’s a pool,” Draco whispers. Lights from the far away buildings illuminate the room enough that Harry could just make out his face, a bare suggestion of eyes and a nose and lips. “We could go.”

“Later,” Harry whispers back. The air seems too heavy for talking - every word feels like a secret, a confession whispered into the hot summer air. “I’m too tired.” 

Silence. The shifting of blankets, the exhale of a breath. Draco turns onto his side - Harry can tell by the changing in weight, the off-kilterness of movement. 

“Do you think you’ll ever fall in love?” he asks, suddenly. 

The words make his throat catch. Harry swallows, hard, closes his eyes and stares at the shifting tangle of colours that fill the space behind his eyelids. He thinks about the colour of Draco’s hair in the sunlight, backlit by the rising sun, the way his eyes shone on that rooftop barely a month ago. Seeing him in the morning, the lights from the pool near-blinding, sweatpants puddled around his feet. The last travel meet they had, on the ferry ride back home, ocean spray and starlight and the freezing bite of the wind against his face. 

And it’s so easy, he thinks, to say no. To say _no, no I don't believe in love. I don’t believe in something like that, something unending, something breathtaking, the kind of love that was reserved for poetry and movies and books with spines so worn that they cracked._

But Harry thinks of chlorine and car rides and metal school buses. Team dinners and parties. Lining up on the edge of the pool, toes dipping into the water, heart in his throat as he stared at Lane Four during finals for 400 freestyle. 

“Yes,” Harry says, out into the darkness, into the soft space between dreams and reality. “Yes, I do.” 

He falls asleep to memories and ghosts and what he thinks might be the brush of a hand on his cheek. 

~

This is how it really started.

It started four months ago, before the motels and the rooftop and the toss of hats in the air. It started with wet towels after practice, the hiss of showers and the cut of locker doors slamming shut. 

Winter. The sky was dark at 5 in the morning and it was still dark at 8 at night. All around was the sound of water - the steady waves of the pool filtering into the gutter, the beat of rain against the roof. The change room is empty, still filled with the half-there ghosts of people, echoed in the left-behind water bottles and forgotten coins. 

The sound of water cutting off is jolting enough to make Harry jolt. There’s the sound of footsteps, impossibly loud against hard tiles. He looks up just in time to see Draco, hair wet from the shower, kickboard and fins in hand. 

“You didn’t have to wait,” he says. 

“What were you going to do?” Harry retorts, and slings Draco’s swim bag over his shoulder. “Walk home?”

Draco’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes.

Back in the car Draco sits like he always does; legs pulled to his chest, hood pulled over his hair, head propped up against the window. The street lamps lay long lines of light across his face - a slender strip sliding from the dashboard to Draco’s cheek and down onto the console between them. His hands lie perfectly still on top of his knees, twisted like the crumpled wings of some long-dead moth. 

They make the drive in silence. Harry glances over every few minutes, slides his gaze across the smooth surface of the mirror. Draco never meets his eyes.

He cuts the engine outside of Draco’s house. The windows are dark enough that he can just make out the watery image of the car reflected back at him in the glass. Draco shifts in his seat, one hand going to the strap of his bag. His hands tighten, hard enough that the knuckles go white, the skin going pale around the carved indents in his palm.

They don’t speak for a while. Rain pours around them, solid and unsteady. Harry watches it settle against the pavement.

“They want me to quit.” 

Harry lifts his head then; Draco’s face is turned away from him, hidden in the soft blur of shadows. “Sorry?”

“My parents.” His voice is tight. Harry stares at the turn of Draco’s neck and imagines the delicate outline of a rope. “They want me to stop swimming.”

Panic is a cold, sick spread in his stomach. Harry takes a deep breath and tries to remember how to breathe. He watches the lights smear together in the rain. “Why?”

At this Draco finally turns to look at him. He looks washed out in the darkness, a faded mess of pale blonde and silver-grey. Harry traces long lines with his eyes and drags his gaze up to meet Draco’s. 

“They think it’s unnatural,” he whispers. Harry can almost hear the ghosts of Draco’s parents bleeding through the thin words. “They think we’re…” 

The _click_ of the car settling around them. The hiss of exhaled breaths. Harry closes his eyes and thinks of silence before the gunshot, before the air exploded into motion and the water rushed up to meet him. 

“What did you tell them?” 

Draco moves then. He wrenches the car door open, his grip almost vicious on the handle as he steps out, swings his bag out of the front seat and over his shoulder. “I told them that all we were was friends,” he says. “That it was all we’d ever be.” 

Harry breathes in, breathes out. The rush of cold air against his skin is almost dizzying. Draco is a ghost in the rain, a drowned creature made of water, a corpse frozen in ice. 

“Good,” he says, and the closing of the car door feels like a fissure line. 

~

He wakes to sunlight. 

The curtains are pulled back, gold seeping in through heavy fabric. The room is still, unchanged from the night before. He stares at the small pile of clothing laid out on the table. 

The bed dips when he turns around, blankets tangled around his feet, pillow half-hanging off the end of the mattress. For a moment he’s blind, fingers reaching wildly, searching unthinkingly for the body next to him. He snatches his arm away before he touches skin. 

He used to imagine this, back when he was younger. Waking up to a room full of sunlight, the comforting weight of a body next to his. Sometimes his dreams were so realistic that he _ached_ when he woke up. 

Somehow the view outside the window looks more depressing in the morning light. Harry wrenches the curtains open; the grey concrete and rusted cars are flat and washed out, nothing more than paper cutouts. 

Draco’s always been a deep sleeper - he’d come to morning practices barely conscious, eyes hidden underneath the shadows of his hood. Harry hums to himself, confident that the light would soon wake him and turns his attention to the bags scattered on the ground. 

When Draco finally stirs, Harry's got the room mostly in order - sweatshirts shoved back into bags, wrappers collected and tossed in the bin. Draco curses as he wakes up, low and hoarse and dirty. Harry stares at Draco’s messy hair and tries not to let his eyes drift to the barest curve of a shoulder half-revealed by the falling sheets. 

“Fuck you,” Draco says. His palms are pressed into his eyes, fingers splayed out over his face. “Fuck you and fuck your stupid morning habits.” 

Harry grins. “Good morning to you too.”

“I hate you,” Draco retorts. There’s no heat behind his words, nothing beyond the catch in his throat, the rawness of sleep. 

“You love me,” Harry replies. He immediately curses himself - Draco goes shock-still in the bed, fingers curled viciously in his hair. His hands still cover most of his face but Harry can just see a sliver of skin through the cracks in Draco’s palms. There’s a myriad of emotions - something like guilt, something like pain before Draco’s face goes suddenly, carefully blank. “Draco - “

They’re pretending. They’re always pretending, ever since that car ride in the pouring rain. If Harry closes his eyes he can almost see it; water against the roof, against his face, the slam of the car door and the wrench of Draco’s knuckles against his bag. He tries to take a breath, swears at the gravel in his throat. 

Draco drops his hands. His face is calm, almost blank. “I’m going to take a shower,” he says, and he’s off the bed in a heartbeat. “15 minutes?”

It feels like a thunderstorm. Everything’s too charged - one look and Harry would be struck down. He tears his eyes away from Draco’s steady gaze. 

“I’ll put our bags in the car,” he mumbles, and Draco doesn’t look back as he tugs the bathroom door shut behind him. 

~

The inside of the car is hot and thick when they finally pull out onto the road. The radio’s back on again, something that neither of them really listen to as Draco flicks the turn signal and spins the car out onto the asphalt. 

The window’s down. Harry takes a deep breath. His lungs fill with dry air and smoke. If he holds his hand out he can feel the wind pushing against his palm. 

Draco’s got one arm causally propped up against the side door, head held in his hand as he turns the wheel with the other. They don’t look at each other. Draco keeps his eyes firmly on the road and Harry stares away, at his own face in the dusty side view mirror. The road stretches on, the bumps in the van in time with the beat of Harry’s heart, the ticking of the meter in the dashboard, the swing of the trinkets in the back. 

Draco had a habit of collecting things - coins and rocks and shells from different places. They’re all strung up on the handlebars in the back, bits of fishing line and driftwood, a floating collection of all the memories Draco had thought to capture. 

Harry thinks of Draco slipping things into his pockets - a quarter from the vending machine last night, the cap from the bottle of Sprite. He thinks of Draco threading string through the lid and around the coin, and his something in his heart twists.

They drive for another hour or so. Harry watches the shrubs and the rocks go by, sneaks glances over his shoulder as he does. Draco looks luminous in the light, melting from silver to rose-gold. Harry wonders why he’d never noticed before.

_You did,_ a small part of him says. _You’ve always noticed._

They finally pull up to a McDonalds. The air is still impossibly hot and sticky - they both wince at the metal of their car, parked under the blazing sun and Harry knows it’s going to burn like hell when they finally go back.

Inside it’s blissfully air conditioned. Harry lets Draco save them a booth while he goes up and orders. He gets them chicken nuggets and chips - and, just to be a bastard - a happy meal for Draco. It arrives in a little cardboard box; Harry sets it on the corner of his tray as he heads towards Draco.

“Dick,” Draco says, the minute he catches sight of the box. 

Harry smirks. “Love how you instantly assumed it was for you.” 

“Who else would it be for?” Draco counters, pulling the tray before him. 

“I don’t know. Me?”

Draco throws his head back and laughs. “ _Baby_ ,” he drawls, and it’s supposed to be mocking, Harry thinks, except the word is said just a bit too slowly, the syllables drawn out between Draco’s lips like taffy. It’s the low roll at the back of his throat, the tilt of his mouth and Harry tries to hide a flush and stares down at his tray furiously.

Draco, mercifully, doesn’t seem to notice. He’s too preoccupied with tearing open the cardboard; the hamburger is left in the box scornfully, the orange juice half-drained with one gulp. He pulls out the little plastic bag of apple slices and glares at Harry. “You couldn’t have gotten me more fries?” 

“Coach is already shuddering at your diet.”

Draco rolls his eyes. “Coach happens to be back home, bitching about the importance of punctuality.”

He eats the apples though, almost carelessly as he turns his attention to the small plastic figure on the table. “What the fuck is this?”

Harry leans over - it’s some sort of telescope, with colorful plastic lenses that snapped on and off to filter the world in shades of red and yellow and blue. He slips one on, holds it up to his eye - he can barely see Draco through the cloudy lens. “A telescope,” he says, just to be annoying. 

Draco doesn’t miss a beat. “We’ll have to go stargazing.” 

Harry stares at him - gold hair, grey eyes, pink lips. “Done.” 

Draco holds his gaze for the briefest moment before dropping his eyes down. “This telescope sucks,” he mutters. Harry throws a fry at him. 

He can’t stop himself from smiling though, when he gets back into the car after using the washroom and spots the red filter strung up in the back and hanging on fishing line. 

~

They’re back on the road again. Harry’s driving this time; Draco’s stretched out in the front seat, legs propped up on the dashboard, his whole body pressed against the side door so that he was nearly facing Harry. They’ve managed to crank the air-con up enough to make the inside of the car just barely tolerable. The sound of dry air fades to background noise in Harry’s ears as he stares at the road in front of him. 

“Do you want gum?” Draco asks. He doesn’t wait for Harry’s answer - there’s the sound of foil and then he’s handing Harry a perfect white rectangle, tips it into Harry’s open palm. It tastes like mint and the faintest hint of something bitter. 

The road stretches out in front of them. There’s another car up ahead - they’re going much too slow for such an open road. Harry steps on the accelerator, watches the meter tick up in steady increments. 

Draco watches the other car, the blur between being close enough to touch and then fading into the distance. “Do you ever think about people?” he says, suddenly. 

Harry frowns. “Like, in general?” 

“No, like…” Draco trails off. He’s only ever careful words or intoxicated streams of unfiltered thoughts. “Like _them_? Those people. They have their own life, right? Like, maybe they’re also on a road trip, or they’re driving to a wedding, or to a funeral. Maybe it’s the happiest day of their life, or the saddest. They’re the most important people in the world to someone, and we don’t know anything about them.”

They’ve had many conversations like this before - lying in bed in a hotel room at a meet, driving home from swim practice, in the showers and the change rooms. Harry smiles softly to himself - it’s a very _Draco_ thing to talk about. “I guess. They all have their stories that we will never know.” 

“And like - “ The slightest stumble in his words, his brain moving too fast for his voice to follow. “Just, the odds. What were the odds, of us meeting them, of us being part of their life for the length of time it took for us to overtake them? Their life will go on and our life will go on but for that briefest moment we intersected.” 

The car’s long faded into the distance, the sky clear and limitless above. Harry spares the slightest look over; Draco’s taken his feet off the dashboard, his hands gesturing animatedly. 

“And isn’t it interesting, who shapes your life? ‘Cause there are so many people who touch you. There’s so many people who become part of your history. But there’s only a couple of people who have the power to change it.” 

_You_ , Harry thinks. The car goes silent. Draco’s watching him - he can feel the heavy weight of his gaze. 

“Am I one of those people?” Harry asks. 

His voice is too soft, too raw. He knows Draco hears it too - Draco’s eyes flicker down, to the console between them, then back up at the side of Harry’s face. 

“What do you think?” Draco replies steadily. 

Harry doesn’t say anything else. 

~

“Are you sure?” Harry had asked, one week before they graduated. 

Draco was sitting on the hood of his car, one foot carelessly propped up against the grill. His hair was still wet from practice, water dripping down his neck, soaking into the thin t-shirt he was wearing. 

It’s ironic. Harry saw Draco practically naked every day, in speedos and racing suits, shirtless and dripping wet. Yet he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the stick of fabric to his shoulders, the jut of his clavicle. It seemed different, somehow, more vulnerable. 

He looked away hurriedly. Draco tipped his head back, arms propped up on the hood behind him.

“Yeah,” he said, almost casually. “What are they going to do? Stop me?” 

Harry’s voice was quiet, near-silent. “You know what they’ll do.” 

Draco’s face darkened. “And you know what I’ve always said. Fuck my parents. I don’t care if I get disowned.”

Harry swallowed, his throat tight and painful. Draco had always been elegant, a kind of cold beauty that hid his true emotions. He knew it would kill him to lose his family. 

Draco’s voice dragged him out of his thoughts. “So. What’s the plan? Where are we going?” 

Harry closed his eyes, and for the briefest, faintest moment he let himself dream.

~

“Please?”

Harry glances at the clock on the dashboard, then up at the sky. “We won’t be able to make it to a motel if we do.” 

“Oh screw the motel,” Draco says. The sun is just barely starting to touch the horizon, the clouds taking on the barest hint of gold. “We’ll sleep in the car. Like at Nationals, remember?” 

Harry rolls his eyes. A couple months ago they had missed the ferry ride home after Nationals had ended - an unlucky combination of finals ending at 10, a horrible mixture of ice and wind and ferries being canceled due to the weather. They couldn’t find a hotel to book - everything was taken by desperate, stranded travellers. They’d slept in the car instead - in their sleeping bags, the car reeking of chlorine.

“You said that you’d rather chew off your own foot then do that again.”

Draco waves his hand dismissively. “Well this time it isn’t pissing with snow. Plus the car doesn’t smell like a pool.” 

“You’re such a hypocrite,” Harry says, but he pulls onto the narrow road heading towards the beach anyway. There’s no one else here - there was another, more popular beach only a short distance away and this tiny strip of sand lay mostly forgotten. 

It’s all golden sand and waves. The sun is lower by the time they park, turning the water shades of bronze-green and amber. It slowly stretches over the surface of the ocean as they both make it down to the sand.

Draco stops just at the shoreline, toes inches away from being brushed by the tide. He’s almost silhouetted in the darkness, his face lit up by the sinking sun, his back cast in shadow from the trees. 

“I’ll race you,” he says, suddenly. Harry swallows - his mouth tastes like ocean salt. 

“Where to?”

Draco points. The beach is slightly curved; there’s a small trail of rocks that arched out into the waves before tapering off into the water. “Up to where those rocks stop and back?” 

Harry hesitates. He takes a step forward - the water is cold against his toes. He’s never liked the smell of the ocean. It reminded him of dying things, all tinted with the scent of brine. “I don’t know…”

Draco smiles then. It’s one of his real smiles; one corner of his lips tilted up, a crooked line across his face. “Scared, Potter?” 

Harry closes his eyes. The first time they had ever raced Draco had whispered those words to him. 200 IM, both of them on the blocks, Harry in lane 4 and Draco in lane 5. The way the whole pool had gone silent, the hiss of anticipation before the _beep_ went off, before the world exploded into motion. 

“Fuck you,” Harry grumbles. Draco’s already pulling his shirt off, tossing it in a heap on the sand. He takes a step forward, into the waves.

“Shit, it’s cold.” 

Harry takes a deep breath. He yanks his own shirt off too, drops it next to Draco’s. The water is freezing - he makes it up to his knees before he starts swearing. Draco steps on his foot by accident - his toes sink into the swirl of soft sand, his legs going numb. 

“I hate you,” he gets out through gritted teeth. Draco splashes him - he yelps and jumps backwards. “You dick!” 

Draco just tilts his head back and laughs. 

“Ready?” he asks, teasingly. “Take your mark…”

On the ‘go’ Harry pushes himself off the bottom of the ground, his whole body tensing instinctively from the cold. He opens his eyes but regrets it - the salt burns, and it’s not like he can actually see anything beyond a swirl of green. He hisses through his teeth and starts swimming. 

Draco’s always been better at long distance freestyle, against Harry’s sprints. He didn’t know how far away the rocks were - maybe a 200, going there and back? 

There’s no use opening his eyes - all he can see is darkness. Harry bites off a string of vicious curses and starts kicking, eyes closed against the waves as he blindly swam forward. He can feel Draco beside him; the splash of his kick, the soft current from his strokes. They both make it to the end of the rocks. It feels odd doing a flip turn without a wall to push back off of, and Harry forces himself to kick harder to compensate. The last 10 meters are brutal - they’re both good at finishes and Harry puts his head down and _sprints_ for the end. 

When they both finally surface they’re gasping. Harry shoves his hair from his face, winces at the burn in his eyes and scowls at Draco. “I won.”

“Bullshit. I saw you finish. No way you beat me.” 

“I was ahead of you the whole way!” 

“You had your eyes closed, how do you know you were ahead of me?”

“I _felt_ you!” 

“You probably felt an eel you absolute idiot - “

The sun’s almost completely gone, the beach cast in shadow. Harry shivers - the wind’s picked up, the waves pulling more insistently at their numb feet, crashing heavily against the shoreline. 

“Maybe we should get out.”

Draco swallows. “Fuck. We don’t have towels.”

“And who’s fault is that?” Harry mutters drily. 

Draco’s smile is radiant.

~

They make it back to the car in time to see the rocks they used as a mark become fully swallowed by the water. It’s freezing, the wind slamming against their wet bodies, icy fingers against cold skin. They dry off as best as they can using their shirts, piling into the car and slamming the doors shut behind them. 

“You idiot,” Harry says. Draco just laughs, wild and giddy. His hair is clumped together, sticking up in spikes all around his face. Harry wants to run his fingers through it. 

They share a bottle of soda, passing it back and forth between their hands, fingers still cold from the water. Harry watches his index finger skid over the curve of Draco’s knuckle, slide into the hollow made by his thumb. 

They watch as the wind pulls the waves higher, tips their edges with crests of white foam. The sun slowly disappears underneath the ocean, trailing streaks of colours across the sky. The stars bloom into existence, a thousand blossoms of white and silver. 

Harry watches Draco’s face smooth out, blurred into shadows and soft edges, a charcoal sketch of a boy looking at the moon.

“Which one’s yours?” he whispers. There’s so many stars, a handful of glowing orbs tipped carelessly over the canvas of the sky. 

Draco swallows. Harry tracks the movement of his throat.

“Here,” he murmurs. His hand is a graceful curve, pressed against the cold glass of the windscreen. “That cluster of four - the uneven square? And the tail that rises and falls - “

“I think I see it.”

Draco’s voice is hoarse. “I know you do.” 

A beat of silence. Harry drags his gaze down from the stars to Draco, and starts as he meets Draco’s gaze. His eyes are wide; Harry can see constellations reflected in his irises, a thousand stars in the spill of Draco’s pupils. For the first time he realizes how close they are - Draco’s hands pressed up at the edge of his seat, Harry’s wrist braced on the console, close enough that all it would take was for Harry to lean closer, to brush his arm against Draco’s -

Draco leans back. It’s slight, almost imperceptible but to Harry it was miles. He jerks his hand away, the sour taste of bile rising up in his throat.

“Maybe we should go to sleep,” Draco says. His voice sounds slightly strangled, catching and snagging and breaking, like the waves crashing over rocks.

“Yeah,” Harry says, quietly. “We’re both exhausted.” 

Something flashes in Draco’s eyes - regret? Longing? It vanishes into the swirl of stardust and moonlight. 

They push the seats back in silence. Draco rummages around and finds the blankets - they’re thin but the night is warm, and the heat from two bodies makes the car comfortable enough to sleep in. Harry wraps himself up in his blanket, turns so that he doesn’t have to face Draco, doesn’t have to watch the soft brush of his hair over his face, the long lines of his chest - 

“Goodnight, Harry,” Draco whispers. His voice sounds oddly muffled, as if he had covered his face with the blanket. 

Harry stares up at the windscreen of the car. The stars shine back at him. He traces patterns, finds the small cluster of stars and follows imaginary lines up with his eyes. 

“Night,” Harry breathes back. 

He watches the spill of stars against the night sky and when he finds Draco, Harry closes his eyes and wishes.

~

The sound of rain against the windscreen wakes him. Harry groans, pushing himself up with shaking hands. Water collects on the roof, spilling over the glass in translucent threads, a river of shifting colours and lines. His neck aches, from whatever fucked-up position he fell asleep in - he had a bad habit of sleeping curled up, legs tucked up and spine bent over his knees. The seat next to him is empty. Harry frowns - he almost always woke before Draco did. 

He rummages around in the back. Their supply of snacks is almost gone; they’d need to stop for food soon. He manages to extract an opened bag of granola, the top half-heartedly mashed shut with one of those binder clips. 

The rain is heavier now, fogging the windows and turning everything into sheets of grey. Harry glares, grits his teeth and forces himself out of the car, heads down the slope and towards the beach.

Draco stands by the edge of the water, his feet bare. The rain stains the thin cotton of his hoodie, the soft bleed from light blue to dark. He’s still, hands hanging loose at his side, hood off despite the weather. 

He doesn’t turn to look as Harry moves beside him, shakes his head at the opened bag of granola. The waves are rough, the water a blur of dark green and grey, edged in ivory foam. 

“You’re going to freeze,” Harry says. His voice sounds thin over the patter of rain, the crash of the tide. 

Draco shrugs. There’s a small flash of white by his feet, the curve of a seashell. He picks it up in one smooth motion, slipping it into the pocket of his hoodie. “Can't be colder than morning practice.” 

“Oh God,” Harry says, fondly. He remembers the mad dash from the pool deck to the car, the balmy warmth giving way to the icy expanse of the parking lot. “Don’t remind me.”

Draco smiles, distantly. His eyes are the exact colour of the sky. “What did you think,” he asks, abruptly, “when you first met me?” 

“ _What an idiot_ ,” Harry answers immediately. He laughs at the look Draco gives him. “Seriously. All wrapped up with your fancy goggles and your fancy shoes - “ 

“Oh fuck off,” Draco mutters.

“ - and the _look_ on your face when you got yelled at by coach - “

Draco effortlessly slides his voice lower. “When I say practice starts at 5:15, I mean practice _really_ starts at 5!” 

Harry throws his head back and laughs. He remembers it like it was yesterday - Draco, pale and skinny, twisting his mesh bag into a rope between his fingers as their Coach screamed at him. “God. How long ago was that? Five years?”

“Six,” Draco says. “We were twelve.” 

The crash of the waves on the shoreline. The rain, soaking into the back of Harry’s sweatshirt, dripping down his neck. 

“I thought you were such a prick when I first saw you,” Draco says, his voice soft with reminiscence. “You were complaining to Ron about something - the set I think? You were all, ‘I wonder if the new boy can keep up. Doesn’t look like it.’ God I wanted to smack you.”

“Wanted?”

Draco grins. “Still do.” 

“Asshole.”

“I kicked your ass in that set.”

“That’s ‘cause it was _kick_ . I _hate_ kick.” 

“Oh, like you haven’t bitched about it to me before.” 

Harry rolls his eyes. He tilts his head down, watches the waves. There’s a glint of something half-buried in the sand that catches his eye - he bends down, thumbing through the rocks until he pulls out a piece of sea glass. It’s light blue, like the colour of Draco’s hoodie, the edges smoothed and worn down by time. 

“For your collection,” he says, and he drops the glass into Draco’s open palm, tries to ignore the light brush of Draco’s fingertips on the back of his hand. “Maybe you can make something with it.”

“I’ll make you a ring,” Draco says, and Harry can hear the grin threaded through his voice. “Oh Harry. Will you be my radiant bride?” 

“Depends how good you are in bed.” Harry tunes out the suggestive noise Draco makes, stares up at the clouds instead. “We probably should go. Unless we want to get caught in the rain?” 

Draco slips the glass into his pocket. “After you,” he says, almost teasingly. 

They make it back to the car just as it begins to pour. 

~

It started when he was fifteen. 

He remembers it exactly - winter training camp, the last session of the day. They had done relays; Draco had started almost a full three seconds ahead of Harry, shooting him a mocking wink just before the dive into the pool. Harry had watched him disappear underwater, all long lines and pale skin and had thought _mine_. 

Later he had tried to justify it to himself - _mine as in he was mine to catch, mine to beat._ He hadn’t believed it, even back then.

He still remembers the shock of cold over his body, quickly ignored as he focused on Draco up ahead. Draco was a distance swimmer, all steady strokes and smooth pulls. He always thrashed Harry in anything over a 200. 

But this was a sprint. It was all-or-nothing, the aching pull of heavy limbs, heads held down in the water and the franticness of a chase. Harry was damn good at those. 

He out-touched Draco by a heartbeat. Most of their races were like this, won by milliseconds, the space of time between two breaths. Harry was drunk on the taste of victory, on the sound of his teammates cheering and -

Draco smiled, something soft and radiant. “Nice one,” he said, arms braced on the lane ropes.

The curve of his shoulders, the plane of his chest. The sound of his _voice_ , breathless from the race, hoarse from the water, how Harry could hear his smile in the catch at the end - 

Looking at Draco was the heady mix of adrenaline, the tension in his muscles before a race. Whispered provocations - _Scared, Potter?_ hissed in the seconds before a dive. Those final, desperate seconds, the lunge before the wall, lungs burning, muscles aching, heartbeat pounding in his ears. 

Hidden behind the darkness of his goggles Harry closed his eyes. He grabbed on to the starting block, fingers tightening around the metal bar they used for backstroke starts, hard enough that he thought he could feel the metal imprinted into his palm. 

“You too,” he said back, and if his voice shook slightly no one else heard it but him. 

~

The rain lessens as the dawn burns through to morning, dries up enough to warrant Draco turning down the window. The sound of air fills the car; the radio is off for once, phones lying abandoned in the empty cup holders. 

They pull up at a market - it’s a tourist attraction, apparently, all crowded stalls and lights strung up above vendors. Harry can barely hear himself over the din - food cooking, people yelling, the sound of the water against the docks. Draco by his side as always, a reassuring weight against the ebb and flow of the noise. 

“I’ve never been to one of these,” he says, his voice barely audible. “Mum always thought it was uncouth.” 

“Fuck your mum,” Harry responds. The sun moves then, out from behind the clouds. It filters everything through shades of dazzling white - everything’s still wet from the rain and the water droplets glow like diamonds. _Like stars,_ Harry thinks, and he wonders what constellations he’ll find. 

They wander idly through the stalls. Draco touches things - a stone knife carved out of obsidian, a glass orb cupped in the palm of his hands. He stops at a jewelry booth - there’s an old lady sitting on a stool behind a wooden table, a blanket spread out under her wares. The sun catches the array of glass jewels and polished metal. Harry lets his gaze slip over sparkling hairpins and gleaming earrings, wondering what Draco could have stopped for. 

He swallows. Draco’s holding a coin threaded through with string, ragged and shiny, worn down by time. There’s a small hole through the coin, not quite in the middle and the edges of the hole gape darkly. “How much?” he asks.

The old lady smiles. She’s missing a tooth, her hands cracked and flaking. She holds her hand out for the trinket, wraps it in paper and ties it off with twine. “A lucky charm, young man. They say you can make wishes on coins with holes.”

“I know,” Draco says, quietly. “That’s why I wanted it.” 

Wishes. There were so many things one could wish on - stars, candles, eyelashes, stones. Harry watches Draco tuck the package away, drop a handful of coins into the lady’s outstretched palms and wonders how many of those wishes would come true. 

They wander around the market some more. Harry’s particularly interested in a toy stand, little soldiers carved out of wood. He watches the flash of the carver’s knife, his back hunched over as he slowly shaped another figure, carved eyes and noses and the curl of a mouth. 

“You should learn how to do that,” he says to Draco, and Draco shoves him lightly. 

When they get hungry they stop at the food stands. Harry exchanges coins for a pretzel - it comes in a paper bag, hot enough to burn his skin. He tears off half of it for Draco, watches the steam rise in curling patterns. 

“Is that mine?” Draco asks. The light catches his eyes, fading the grey into a lighter shade of silver. 

Harry nods. He holds the piece out, expecting Draco to take it, waits for the brush of his fingers against Harry’s palm.

Instead Draco bends over. He holds his mouth over Harry’s hand and _bites_ , chewing down on the soft pretzel.

“Wait,” Harry says, “Careful - “

It’s too late. Draco jerks back with a curse - “Fuck!” he yelps, mouth open as he exhaled smoke into the air. “Fuck, it’s hot. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck - “

“You idiot!” Harry grins, even as that _feeling_ in his chest rose, the fluttering that he’d long associated with Draco. “What’d you go and bite it like that for?”

“I was hungry!” Draco whines. He manages to swallow his mouthful of bread. “Jesus that was hot. I think I burnt my tongue off.” 

“Oh no,” Harry deadpans. “Whatever will he do without a tongue?”

“Fuck off.”

Harry rolls his eyes. He stuffs a bite of pretzel into his mouth. It’s fluffy, all salt and warm dough.Draco goes and takes his share, tears it up into small pieces and lets the air cool the insides down. “They should have put a warning on the bag. You know how they do that for coffee?” 

“What, ‘Warning, contents hot?’ Most people can already tell, dipshit.” 

Draco just scoffs, returning his attention to his food. Harry swallows the last of his pretzel, and he thinks summer tastes like heat and sea salt.

~

He opens his eyes to the sunset. 

Harry blinks, disorientated. He’s curled up in the front seat, hood pulled over his head, shoes off and legs twisted to the side. There’s soft music playing through one earbud - the other must have fallen out, the cord tangled around his neck. His phone blinks up at him when he shifts.

“Shit,” he mutters, scrambling to sit up. “Draco, it’s almost seven.” 

“Took you long enough,” Draco replies drily. Harry watches as he knocks back the dregs of his iced tea, replaces it back in the cup holder. 

“Draco, you’ve been driving since twelve.” 

Draco shrugs. He flicks the indicator, moves over to the fast lane. The sun sets in front of them, washing the inside of the car in soft shades of orange. Draco’s hair looks like moonlight, all tousled silver and hints of gold. 

“Draco,” Harry says again. His voice is dry from sleeping and it rasps against his throat. “You said you’d wake me.” 

“Oops.” 

“Pull over,” Harry says, and he ignores Draco’s glare, ignoring the way the dying sun spun webs of light over the curve of his cheek. “Now.”

He knows Draco’s truly exhausted when he pulls over to the side of the road without complaining. They wait there for a few moments; Draco’s bent over the steering wheel, head buried into the crook of his arms. Harry stares at the slope of his shoulder and swallows hard.

“Draco?”

Draco lifts his head, glares at Harry. His eyes look dry and burnt out. “You’re so cute when you sleep,” he drawls, and gets out of the car.

Harry follows him. He feels almost shell shocked, like he was balanced on the deck of a boat, waves looming in the distance and under his feet. Draco tosses him the keys. 

They start back up again. Harry flips down the visor to shield his eyes from the sun, squints into the distance. His phone’s almost dead and when he plugs it in the screen lights Draco’s face with a sickly glow. Draco’s half-asleep in the passenger seat, eyes half-lidded and listless.

“You should have woken me,” Harry says again. Draco’s words echo in his head; _You’re so cute when you sleep._ “Why didn’t you?” 

Draco shrugs, face propped up on his knees. “Couldn’t be bothered to,” he says, but Harry can hear the lie through his voice. “It’s only an hour and a half to the motel. I would have been fine.”

“Martyr,” Harry mutters under his breath. 

Draco grins.

~

When they get there, Harry helps Draco carry the bags up. He pauses just long enough to dump everything on the bed before turning around again. Draco grabs his arm, fingers catching on his sleeve, tangled in the drawstring. 

“Where are you going?”

“Store.” Harry spins the keys around his finger. “We need more food. Also, dinner.” 

Draco raises an eyebrow. “Is there even a store - “

“Couple blocks down.” He rolls his eyes. “Take a shower dude. I’ll be back in a bit.” 

He takes the stairs down two at a time, pausing only to pull up directions on his phone. The drive there feels off-kilter - everything’s too silent, too dark. He’s grown used to the subtle weight of Draco beside him; the sound of his breathing, the glow of his phone. That electronic mix that always played on the radio, the odd compromise between both their tastes in music. It feels almost _wrong_ to be without him, after so many days together. 

The store is nearly empty - it’s all neon lights and silent aisles. the lit-up sign on the window - _Closed at 9,_ it reads. He winces, reaches for the stack of plastic baskets and heads for the snack aisle. 

His footsteps echo oddly, the only sound the hum of the generators, faint voices from the few employees left in the building. Harry grabs a handful of chip bags, a random assortment of chocolate bars and some cans of iced tea. Draco hated coffee; Harry’s always teased him about that, muttered things like _tea snob_ and _not even a fancy French press?_ under his breath. He takes a minute to toss in a couple of bags of candy and adds in a few more cans of soda before heading out of the snack aisle.

He stops in a row full of instant noodles. He’s always associated ramen with Draco - too many late night swim meets, noodles spinning in the microwave, the hotel room smelling of chlorine and wet towels. He remembers spilling his soup over his cover at one meet - him and Draco shared beds that night, bickered about cold toes and blanket hogging. 

Harry smiles. He pokes through the array of colourful cardboard cylinders. Draco didn’t like the chicken flavored ones - he had mentioned it to Harry off-handedly once, hated the way it seemed to taste so much more artificial than the others. 

He drops two beef noodles into his basket and heads for the cash register. He pays with his card, accepts the bags from the sleepy looking cashier and heads back to the motel.

The room smells of shampoo when he gets back. Draco’s on the bed - he’s just in his sweatpants, his hair damp and flat against his head. He leaps off to help Harry with the bags. Harry can hear the sound of cars through the thin windows at the back, the beginning of rain against the roof. 

“Ramen,” Draco says, and the corner of his mouth quirks up. “I’m getting flashbacks.” 

Harry chucks the two containers over at him. “Do we have forks?” 

“Chopsticks, somewhere.” Draco rummages through his bag, the ramen abandoned on the bed. “You can shower if you want. I left you some shampoo.”

“Didn’t hog it like last time?”

“Please,” Draco mutters. “You wash your hair with body soap.”

The shower’s nice. It’s better than most of the places - Harry still remembers the third hotel they’d stayed in, with a clogged drain and tepid water from rusted taps. At least this one didn’t go boiling hot whenever Draco dropped something on the ground. 

He scrubs his head with the shampoo Draco had left him - it’s some sort of floral scent, almost cloying at the back of Harry’s throat. He has to smack the opening of the bottle against the palm of his hand to get anything out, making him roll his eyes at Draco’s decadence, and he watches the suds swirl down the drain. 

Draco has the noodles done by the time Harry emerges. It sits on the desk, steam rising into the air; Draco’s perched on the bed, balancing the cup on the ball of his knee. 

“Nice pyjamas,” he says sarcastically. Harry scowls - he’s cold, his bare chest itching underneath Draco’s steady eyes. 

“I don’t have a clean shirt. We’ll need to do laundry soon - “

A wad of grey fabric hits him in the face. Harry shakes it out gingerly - it’s a hoodie from Nationals last year, _Malfoy_ written down one sleeve in black letters. Harry flips the shirt around, traces the heavy block of names until he finds his own, _Potter, Harry_ near the middle. 

“Are you sure - “

Draco waves him off, his chopsticks suspended between his fingers. “We’re similar sizes. It’s fine.” 

The hoodie smells like the beach, green tea and the faintest scent of chlorine. It smells like _Draco_. 

Harry pulls it over his head and hopes the room’s dim enough to hide the blush spreading over his cheeks. 

~

He dreams of the first time Draco called him, almost two and a half years ago. 

It wasn’t _technically_ the first time. They’d talked multiple times before - on the phone, through texts, at practice. Draco never was one to initiate anything though - it was always Harry, cross-legged on his bed at three in the morning, irrational thoughts and hidden feelings. 

But it was the first time Draco called him, just past midnight, with a shaking, awful voice, the static of rain in the background.

“Can you come get me?” he had asked.

Harry was already out of bed. “Where are you?” 

He had sped over to Draco’s house in a near-panic, down the empty highway and cutting across narrow streets. Draco was sitting on the curb, feet half in the gutter - he had pulled the hood of his raincoat partially over his head, letting the rain stick strands of his hair against his face. Harry threw the car door open, helped Draco inside. 

“What the fuck happened?”

“I didn’t know who else to call,” Draco whispered, and his voice was shattered glass. Water dripped off his face, against the upholstery of Harry’s seats, ran onto the rubber mat and into the cracks where the door closed against the floor. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

“Fuck that,” Harry said tightly. He stared at Draco; harsh lines, faded colors, a wilted petal beaten down by the rain. “What - “

“Can we please drive?” Draco breathed. It’s only the cracks in his throat that jolted Harry out of his mist of fog and fury. He cut the headlights on, peeled away from Draco’s driveway, didn't miss the way Draco’s shoulders visibly relaxed with every second that passed. 

Draco stared at his hands as they drove, watching street lamps smear light over his palms. Harry kept checking his mirror, kept checking for something, anything, shadows in the rain -

“They kicked me out,” Draco said. He’s determinedly not looking at Harry - Harry caught the barest line of a shoulder, the faintest curve of a neck. 

He swallowed. “How long?”

“Probably only a few days,” Draco muttered. He laughs, low and bitter. “Best not to let me out of their sight for much longer after that.”

“What happened?”

“They - “ Draco cut himself off almost viciously, the words bleeding out of his throat. “They found something they shouldn’t have.” 

“What do you mean - “

“I don’t want to talk about it,” 

Harry nods, even as his head burned with questions. “Are you alright?”

“Sure,” Draco said. His eyes clearly shone _no_. “Please.”

Harry didn’t have to ask what Draco was asking. They knew each other - whispered words, hidden voices, sometimes so in sync that it hurt. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

~

The shrill sound of Draco’s alarm cuts through the fog in his head. Harry sits bolt upright in the bed, heart pounding: the morning light is thin and watery, leaking in from the cracks in the blinds. He buries his head under the pillow and groans at the noise. 

In a way the repetitiveness of the days helps to ground him. Every morning started like this - Harry waking, then Draco, tangled blankets and warm sheets, clothes piled into zippered bags and the squeal of tires on the pavement. The consistent poetry of an ordinary life, beautiful in its simplicity. It hurts so much that Harry can’t breathe.

The alarm finally cuts off - Draco must have finally reached for his phone. The room suddenly feels achingly silent without it. 

They move in sync - trash put away, snacks packed into bags. They brush their teeth side by side in the bathroom, and Harry lets his eyes drift over to Draco’s in the mirror. 

Draco stops. Spits into the sink, rinses his mouth with water. “You’re still wearing my hoodie,” he says, and Harry wonders if he’d imagined the slight waver in Draco’s voice. 

“Do you want it back?” 

He can visibly see Draco swallow, the soft flex of his throat, the way he raked fingers through his hair and turned away. “Wear it. You can give it back later.” 

_Are you sure?_ Harry almost asks, then stops himself. Everything seemed oddly fragile, sheets of too-thin ice spread out over water. He wonders what it would feel like to step forward, put his foot out and fall. 

“Thanks,” he says instead. He curls his fingers inside the sleeves, digs his nails into his palms. “I’ll pass it back to you tonight.”

~

They stop at a gas station two hours into the drive. The sun had partially come up, though the clouds were still tinted in shades of dusty rose and shot through with orange. Harry fills up the tank while Draco sits on the hood, legs crossed at the ankles, arms braced behind him. 

“Do you want anything?” Draco says, and tilts his head towards the small shop. Harry can just catch the neon glow from the drink coolers, rows of cans in tidy rows on the shelves. It’s early enough that the air had the slightest bit of a chill to it, though Harry knew it would all be burnt off by the afternoon. 

“I’m good.” The gas station is empty around them, all flickering lights and peeling paint. Harry breathes in, ignores the burn of gasoline fumes against his nose. “Are you getting anything?” 

Draco shrugs. “Debating if I should get some gum or not.” 

“Do you _want_ gum?” 

Draco just laughs. His eyes flick down to Harry’s arm where his own name stares back at him and then back up. Harry almost asks him again about the hoodie. There’s something about Draco’s face that warns him not to push it though - a slight edge in the set of his face. Draco’s eyes skid over Harry’s, and there’s something forlorn in his gaze. 

“I was thinking,” he says, his voice too-casual, too smooth. “There’s two types of people, right? People who fight like hell to get something and people who fight like hell to keep it.” 

Harry tightens his grip on the plastic handle, fingers digging into the sides. “What do you mean?”

“Like you for example. You’re a chaser. When you want something you go for it. It’s all or nothing. It’s a sprint. You see what you want and you fight like hell to get it.”

_Not everything I want_ , Harry thinks. He swallows the thought, the taste bitter in his mouth. “And you?” 

Draco gives him a half smile. “Once I have something, it’s hard for me to let go.”

The numbers on the display tick up in an endless march, the sound of gas rushing through the rubber in Harry’s hand. The fluorescent lights make everything foggy, a study of mist and brilliance and the barest suggestion of shapes. He stares at Draco and thinks he looks like an angel - the biblical ones, wreathed in fire and ichor and glory. 

“What can’t you let go of?” 

Draco pushes himself off the hood - the back of his jacket is covered in dust from the windscreen, smeared over the dark fabric. “I think I want gum after all,” he hums. 

Harry recognizes fleeing when he sees it but he lets Draco go inside without calling it out. The air suddenly seems colder without Draco watching him, his body stretched out on the car. He lets out a long breath, fingers still clenched so tightly he thinks they might cramp.

Draco doesn’t come back until just before the gun gives a shuddering jolt in Harry’s hand, the gas cutting off abruptly. The sun had risen a little more, turning the dust on the car into a thick mat. Harry raises an eyebrow at Draco, who shrugs. 

“Car wash?” 

“We could have just cleaned it by hand,” Harry grumbles, but he gets into the car anyway, pulls up to the tiny kiosk and punches in numbers. There’s no line - they move into the nearest bay. The green light blinks maddening at them; on and off, a warning symbol to wind up the windows and lock the doors.

Dimly Harry realizes this might have been a bad idea. There’s always something to distract them while driving - the endless stretch of road, the setting sun, the stars. There’s always something he can use to keep his attention from snagging on Draco, a buffer he can slide between the magnetic pull of his eyes. He’s always been good at that, holding his breath and looking away.

But they’re too close now; in the dark, the pulsing glow of the lights. Draco’s hand sprayed out on the console, fingers inches away from the curve of Harry’s knee. The light slides off the arc of Draco’s neck, lights his skin up in soft shades of green. 

The water is loud. Harry watches it ricochet off the windscreen, turn the world into blank white. He thinks he can feel the car shake under the force, feel the vibrations travel through the metal and against his fingertips. 

“What if the glass cracks?” Draco murmurs. The water cuts off - his face is illuminated briefly, before disappearing under the shadow of multi-hued soap. 

“Goodbye road trip. Hello furious father.” 

Draco laughs, though the noise is cut short by the sound of soap and water against the roof. Harry can actually see the dirt slipping off the glass, streaks of grey and brown and black. He tries not to think of Draco, body pressed against the hood of the car. 

Gears. Colours. Draco’s face, distorted by shadow and the flash of lights, warped by the lines of coloured foam and soap. 

The water comes back again, blasting the world back into focus. Harry hears the beeping noise that signaled for movement, the roar of the dryers turning on. He edges the car forward without thinking. The water droplets scuttle up the windscreen and disappear over the curve of the roof. 

They come out to a mostly blue sky, the pink of the dawn faded to just a strip of yellow near the horizon. Draco silently pulls out a bottle from the plastic bag by his feet - Harry raises an eyebrow. 

“I thought you hated coffee.”

Draco rolls his eyes. “It’s for you dumbass.” 

The bottle is cold against Harry’s hand when Draco passes it over. Draco’s index skims over the rise of Harry’s knuckles, the barest brush of movement and yet Harry swears he feels his hand burn. “Thanks.” 

The car stops. Harry sucks in a deep breath - everything is too bright, too raw. It’s the press of glass against his palm, the rub of Draco’s hoodie against his skin, the nostalgia for something that never happened. He grips the steering wheel - his fingers ache in protest from clenching onto the gas dispenser, an echo of a bruise.

“Harry?” Draco asks, then shakes his head. “I’m driving.” 

Harry doesn’t argue. He switches places with Draco. The seat is still warm when he settles down, the ghostly imprint of Draco’s body.

Draco holds his hands out. “Keys?” 

He can’t bring himself to pass them over, to feel Draco’s hand on his again. He drops it into Draco’s lap instead, watches the glint of sunlight on metal. Draco slips it into the ignition - the car comes alive, the rumble of the engine comforting and steady. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” Harry breathes. “Just tired. Sorry.” 

Draco shoots him a concerned look. “Let’s get something to eat. Ice cream?”

“McFlurry?”

“Sold.” 

They pull out of the gas station, and as Harry watches the carwash fade into the distance he wonders what it was that Draco couldn’t let go.

~

They pull over at the side of the road. It’s pretty much deserted - the asphalt stretches endlessly in both directions, a streak of black against the red soil. Harry clutches the ice creams in his hands - it’s only a little melted, the plastic spoons sticking out of the open lid. 

They roll the windows down. Tiny bits of wind slip into the car, cool kisses against his skin. Harry takes a bite of his ice cream, lets the cold numb his tongue and burn against the back of his throat. 

Draco’s twisted over in his seat, his back against the car door and legs pulled up sideways. Harry mirrors him so they’re facing each other. He’s so, so careful not to let their legs touch. 

Draco leans his head against the open window and moans, the sound prickling uncomfortably in Harry’s ears. “God. Why does it have to be so _hot_?” 

“You’re in a hoodie,” Harry points out. Draco had rolled the sleeves up to just below his elbows, the blue tracery of his veins visible through the pale skin. “Take it off.”

“Oh he wants to see me naked,” Draco drawls, but he strips the hoodie off anyways. Harry stares at him - he’s in an oversized shirt, the kind they used to buy to easily slip over wet bodies. It hangs oddly on him - tight on the shoulders, loose everywhere else, riding up Draco’s rib cage where he twists to chuck the fabric into the back. If he closes his eyes Harry can picture him, all lean muscle and long lines, the arc of his spine as it melded into his shoulder blades.

He shoves his spoon into his mouth, as if he could choke the thoughts down with sugar and ice. Draco gives him a strange look - he’s wearing the coin, Harry realizes, the coin he had bought from the market the day before. It’s threaded around his neck, hanging in the hollow of his throat, glinting in the reflection of the blazing sun. He wonders what Draco wished for. 

“Are you alright?”

“Fine,” Harry mutters, and shovels more ice cream into his mouth. Draco tracks the movement, one eyebrow raised, his own ice cream forgotten in his hand. Harry inclines his head at it - “It’s going to melt.” 

Draco rolls his eyes. He presses his wrist against the curve of the cup, fingers splayed out into the air. 

A beat of silence. The damp feeling of his ice cream, water condensed on the outside of the container. Harry flexes his hand, not liking the sticky feeling of his skin. 

“I don’t know how you eat that,” he murmurs. Both of Draco’s eyebrows flick up. 

“Are we going to do this again?”

Harry holds a hand out, at the swirl of colours inside Draco’s cup. “M&M Mcflurries are shit. It looks like a rainbow threw up in your ice cream.” 

“Oh says Mr Original over here. The only way you could get more basic than Oreos is if you got a fucking _vanilla cone_ instead.” 

“Just because I don’t want to eat psychedelic mushrooms - “ 

“Get off your fucking high horse,” Draco says, and without warning he lunges for Harry’s ice cream. Harry lets him rip the spoon out of his hand, lets him take a bite of the ice cream. He stares at the back of Draco’s neck, slightly flushed from the heat, at the fall of his hair around his face and the stretch of his body across the console. 

Draco straightens, grinning; Harry’s spoon dangles between his fingers like a trophy. “Tastes like shit,” he declares triumphantly. “The Oreos don’t even taste like anything. It’s just thick and crunchy milk.” 

“That is the most horrible description of ice cream that I’ve ever heard,” Harry retorts. Draco hands him the spoon back. His face is lit up, all grins and laughter, the light from the sun partially slanted over his face. 

Harry takes a bite and tries not to think about the imprint of Draco’s lips on the plastic, the whisper of Draco’s breath. The grass sways around them, a million blades rasping in the wind, a memory of a storm. 

“I wish this could last forever,” Draco says suddenly.

Harry drags his gaze away from the windscreen to Draco. 

“What do you mean?”

“This. Us. The road trip.” Draco makes a vague motion, somehow encompassing everything and nothing at once. “You know. Shitty motels and shitty food. Waking up at six and diving for hours. The sunrises.”

“We saw sunrises all the time,” Harry points out. They saw one pretty much every day actually - they had to cross a bridge to get to the pool and every morning they’d catch the sun from behind the clouds, reflected in the river below them. 

Draco shrugs. His hands flutter in the air, a twisting pattern traced in dust. “Not like these ones.” 

Harry thinks about it - the way the whole car lit up in shades of orange and pink and gold, the darkness that only came with empty highways and ghost towns. Draco, asleep in the seat next to him, all smoothed lines and silver. 

Without thinking Harry reaches out. He thinks he hears Draco’s breath catch slightly as he moves forward, runs his thumb over the coin in the hollow of Draco’s neck. When he twists it into the light it glows like a star, a fragment of the heavens in the curve of Draco’s throat. “Did you wish for it? For this to last forever?” _God_ his voice sounds wrecked. His hands are cold from the ice cream - he can feel the heat radiating off Draco’s body in pulsing waves. 

Draco drags his eyes up, steady silver and cold grey. “I wished for something else.” 

Harry’s voice drops to a whisper. “That’s fair. No point hoping for something that could never happen.”

The corner of Draco’s mouth curves up. “Doesn’t stop me from wishing anyways.” 

The tug of cord around Draco’s neck. The rasp of the wind outside the windows. Harry digs his thumb into the edge of the coin, doesn’t miss the hitch in Draco’s breathing as he lets go. 

He takes a breath. The ice creams lie forgotten in the cup holders between them. Draco’s hand goes up to his own neck; he twists the coin almost viciously, leaving a red mark in the soft skin. “Is it something you want?” 

Draco gives him a slow, sweet smile. “Perhaps,” he echoes. His fingers go white where he grips the coin. “Why else would I wish for it?”

~

The leather of the steering wheel is sticky against Harry’s hand. It’s one of those days, the air sluggish and warm, everything golden and burnt umber. Draco’s pulled his hoodie up behind him, a makeshift pillow to lean back on as he stares blankly out of the windscreen.

Harry coughs. His throat is gravelly, his eyes burning. The sun hangs directly in front of him, almost on the verge of setting. “How much further to the motel?” 

“Uh…” Draco digs his phone out of his pocket. He flicks it on with one hand, the other pushing handfuls of hair out of his eyes. “Two hours? Give or take.” 

Harry glances over. Draco flicks his gaze up from the light of his screen; he grins when their eyes meet. “Fuck it.”

It’s another ten minutes before Harry finds a place to pull over, a tiny field in the middle of nowhere. It’s all dead grass and dirt, the sky so low that Harry thought he could brush it with his fingers, the clouds pale wisps of light orange. They fling open all the doors and pop open the back - Harry brushes off the hood of the car while Draco goes through the snack bag. He finds a bag of chips and a bottle of Sprite - “Oh shut up,” he mutters when Harry smirks, climbs up to rest against the windshield next to him.

They sit like that for a bit; Harry with his knees pulled up against his chest, Draco with his legs sprawled out and shoes toed off, all ankles and bare feet. They pass the bottle of Sprite back and forth - it’s almost too sweet, too saturated. Road trips always tasted like salt and sugar and oil, the fizz of soda against tongues, the sourness from candy coating lips. 

Despite everything the night begins to cool. The metal of the car is still warm against Harry’s back, echoes of a day now gone. Draco’s body is a searing warmth next to him, bleeding through the thin cotton of their shirts where Harry’s arm brushed against Draco’s. If he reaches out he’d be able to press his hand against Draco’s rib cage, line his fingers up with the rise and fall of his bones. 

“It’s been two weeks,” Draco says. Harry turns to look at him; Draco has his head nearly tipped back, the vulnerable curve of his neck exposed to the sky. “Two weeks since we left.” 

Harry swallows. It felt like too much time and too little all at once. “Doesn’t feel like it.” 

He wonders if all road trips felt like this - time replaced with _yesterday_ and _today_ and, in the far off future, the devastating knowledge of everything finally ending. 

Draco makes a soft noise. He holds the last of the bottle out to Harry; when Harry shakes his head he drains it, tosses it through the open door of the car onto the passenger seat. The world settles around them - insects, wind, the babble of some hidden stream. Harry closes his eyes and breathes in the smell of bush. 

There’s the weight of something being draped around him - Draco had found one of their blankets. He wraps it around the two of them, traps the heat from the car in between their two bodies. It pulls them impossibly closer; Harry’s shoulder an unbroken line with Draco’s. 

“If this were a movie,” Draco says, and he holds his hand out to the sky, fingers spread as if he could capture the stars in his palm. “If this were a movie there’d be a meteor shower. One of those gorgeous ones, with the thousands of falling stars. And we’d talk and confess our secrets and a shooting star would appear just as we promised each other to never leave.” 

Harry laughs over the tightness in his throat. “There would’ve been a bonfire too. One of those huge ones.” “And the music - oh my god the music would have either been so ridiculously cheesy or incredible. And the camera would have been perfectly positioned behind us so we were silhouetted against the sky.” 

_We already are,_ Harry thinks. The light’s almost gone - he can only make out the faintest suggestions of Draco - the hint of his jaw, the thin lines of his lashes. It’s only the burning press of his body that reminds Harry that he was real. 

“I don’t want this to stop,” Harry whispers, into the night air, into the soft darkness and the space between their bodies. “I don’t want to go back.” 

Golden mornings, silver twilight. It felt like dreamland - faded and soft and worn-out, time stretching into nothing all around them. The world could have fallen to pieces and Harry would have been too lost in Draco’s eyes to notice. 

“I don’t want to go back either.”

It sounds like a secret. It feels like a confession.

The night dwindles to silence, the sun moving from brilliant scarlet to darkness. Harry watches the stars blink into existence - there’s no meteor shower but he still thinks they look beautiful. He finds Draco’s stars almost instantly. 

Harry closes his eyes. It’s all burned into the backs of his eyelids anyways, spiralling colours, spinning lights. He knows he should probably get up, move back into the car - falling asleep upright was going to be hell on his neck. He can’t bring himself to move though. Everything’s so warm, the comforting press of Draco beside him, the sound of insects and birds lulling him to sleep. 

He thinks he lets his head drop. He thinks he feels Draco’s hands on him, soft against his skin. He thinks he hears Draco whisper something to him, lost within his enveloping dreams. 

Harry falls asleep, and in his head he sees rivers of silver pouring from the sky.

~

He remembers being sixteen, lined up on the edge of the pool deck with the rest of the team. He was still in his racing suit, the waistband digging uncomfortably tight into his skin, hair wet and dripping down his back. He knew he should warm down - knew he would ache like hell tomorrow but he couldn’t drag himself away. 

The announcer said something - Harry dimly caught _Men's 800 Freestyle A Finals_. He mostly tuned out the rest of the man’s words, fingers digging into the barrier so hard it hurt. He was nervous, almost painfully so - even before his own final earlier that evening he didn’t think he’d felt like this. 

The pool went silent. It was this moment that always stuck with Harry - the sudden shift from noise to emptiness, the water lapping at the gutters of the pool. He stared at Draco. Lane 5, body curled over the block, every muscle tense as he waited for the beep. 

There’s always a moment in every race, body arching through the air, the shock of the water against skin. Draco’s freestyle is beautiful - long and even, cutting almost effortlessly through the water. Harry watched him flip against the wall, sprays of water soaking over the bulkhead. 

The last 100 was always the most interesting, Harry thought. Everyone either faded away or sprinted, dolphin kicks and flip turns, heads held down at the flags. The last desperate push to the finish - it always was the same no matter what event it was, the final lunge for the wall, fingers smashing against the touchpad. He watched Draco fold himself over his middle, fingers wrapped around the lane ropes, shoulders heaving as he turned to see his time. 

Harry caught the grin on Draco’s face, even from halfway down the pool. 

“Congrats,” he told him, after Draco shoved his way through the crowd, goggles and cap dangling in his hand. His medal gleamed against his bare chest. “You were amazing.” 

Draco ducked his head. “Coach yelled at me. Said I breathed on the first stroke at the last 50. Called me an idiot.”

“You still won.”

“That’s what I told him. He said I was being a smartass.” 

It’s the clamour of the crowd around them, the water that dripped down Harry’s back. The feeling of Draco’s arm around Harry’s shoulders, still wet from his swim. “Warm down with me?” 

Harry shook the thoughts off. He wondered if Draco could see what he was thinking.

“Sure.”

He let Draco pull him into the warm-down pool and wondered if he could drown his thoughts away. 

~

Harry wakes on the roof of the car, his neck throbbing. The light burns even through his eyelids, a flat glow of red. Opening his eyes is a challenge - everything is too bright and his eyes are too dry. The metal of the car burns underneath his legs; Harry grabs half-heartedly at the blanket around his legs and freezes at the heavy weight of Draco’s head on his shoulder. 

He forces himself to open his eyes - the world rushes in, white light and flames. He has to look down at his legs, blink the spots from his vision before he finally can look over at Draco. 

He’s beautiful. He’s always beautiful. Even at five in the morning, eleven at night, dripping wet from the pool or in hoodies and sweatpants. Laid out on the car; limbs splayed out, blanket tangled around his waist, the flutter of his eyelashes against the side of Harry’s neck. 

Harry looks at him and he burns. 

_It hurts more now,_ he thinks, as he stares down at Draco’s face, the way it was unguarded and trusting, in a way that it never was when he was awake. _It hurts more now that I’m with him._

This is what he told himself, on that rooftop so many weeks ago. A mouthful, he had called it. One last aching, gasping mouthful, one last chance to swallow down as much as he could. One last chance to be with Draco, to wake up in the mornings and see him, to fall asleep to the sound of his breaths, to pretend that the years would tick over and yet everything would be the same. One last mouthful before he fell backwards and let himself burn. _It’ll be enough_ , he told himself, the cold concrete digging into his _p_ alms. _It’ll have to be enough._

Except it wasn’t. Except all Harry could see was his time slipping away, sand falling through splayed fingers, a candle burning down to nothing. Harry opened his mouth and drank as much of everything as he could, tried to convince himself that he was finished, he was done and yet he still wanted more. He always wanted more.

_You’re a chaser,_ Draco had told him in the gas station. He’d run and run and run after Draco and he’d still never reach him. 

_Remember this,_ he tells himself, as if he could etch it into his memories, burn it into his dreams. 

The metal of the car under his thighs. The whisper of Draco’s breath against his neck. The sun, yet another day slipping through Harry’s fingers, another day that he’d never get back. Another day that he’d look back on later, with all the bitterness of longing, wish with all his heart that he could turn back time. _Remember all of it._

Draco opens his eyes. 

It’s always beautiful watching someone wake up - the restlessness, the stirring. The brief moment between dreaming and waking, eyes opening and actually seeing, involuntary movements before everything kicked in and Draco woke up. 

“Hey,” Harry says, his voice sounding dry and burnt-out. “Morning.” 

A beat of silence. Draco slowly pushes himself up; Harry’s shoulders ache from the loss of pressure, the blood rushing to his arms. There’s a crease on his cheek from Harry’s shirt, a red line streaked across Draco’s cheekbone; Harry puts his finger to it. Draco lets him, pupils blown wide despite the light, lets Harry trace a gentle line across his skin. 

His body hurts. His skin feels raw, scrubbed down. His chest and shoulders and neck aches, his eyes burning, his mouth dry and yet all Harry could think about was the skin underneath his fingertips, the way Draco closed his eyes so briefly when his thumb swiped just underneath the curve of his eye. 

“Draco - “

Draco moves then. His hand comes up, closes around Harry’s wrist. “Don’t,” he warns, too softly, his voice steady despite the tremble in his hands. His fingers dig into Harry’s skin, awful and uneven. “Please.”

It feels like someone stabbed him, as if it were Harry’s heart Draco was holding and not his wrist. Harry jerks back off the car - Draco lets him go and he tumbles off in a graceless motion, all shaking limbs and heaviness. “I’m - “

“We agreed,” Draco murmurs, and his voice is low and deadly. “We agreed that we were friends. _That it was all we’d ever be_.” 

Memories of words. The smell of chlorine, the dark windows of a house. Draco, feet in the gutter, hood half-pulled over his head, water soaking his feet. 

“I didn’t know,” Harry gets out, over the echoes of rain in his head. “I - I thought - “

Draco turns away. His face crumples for the whisper of a breath, a single, aching moment before it smooths out again. “Please go,” he breathes, and Harry leaves him curled over on the hood, like a shattered piece of a broken mirror.

~

He first meets Draco’s father when he’s fifteen. 

It was after their relay - 200 medley, Draco on back, Ron on breast, Blaise on fly and Harry on freestyle. They had won - by almost a full body length Harry remembered, setting the meet record for the event. He remembers standing on the blocks, all four of them crammed onto the first place podium, arms around each other as the medals were draped around their necks. 

He still didn’t know what happened, exactly. Maybe he was too loud, too animated. Maybe he took too long to lift his hand from where it curved around Draco’s side. 

Draco froze. Harry could feel it, the tension bleeding into his body, the way the light died from his eyes. “Take your hand off,” he hissed, and Harry wrenched his arm away. Ron and Blaise had long since disappeared into the crowd - it was just the two of them, Draco’s fear leaching out into the air. 

“I thought you said your parents didn’t care about you.” 

Draco swallowed. One hand ghosted up to his side, the faintest brush of fingers digging into his own skin. _Holidays are the worst_ , he’d once told Harry, half-asleep and drunk on exhaustion. _Easier to hide the marks._

His voice was steady, in that awful, fragile way, the voice Draco always used desperately trying not to fall apart. “My mother doesn’t care,” he said, and it could almost pass for nonchalance if Harry didn’t know him so well. “My father cares too much.” 

“Draco,” Harry started, before the crowd parted and he saw Lucius Malfoy for the first time. 

The worst part was that he looked like Draco. Almost exactly - all high cheekbones and white-blond, down to the set of his lips and the way he carries himself, as if the world was watching and waiting to tear him apart. He was Draco but dead - hollow, cruel eyes, the smoothness of his motions that made everything look rehearsed. Harry gritted his teeth, watched the laughter and joy and spirit fade from Draco’s eyes. 

They stood like that for a bit. Harry dimly noticed the way the world seemed to go silent, everything narrowing down to the father and son in front of him. 

“Father,” Draco said. His voice was achingly steady. “This is my...my friend.” 

Lucius’ eyes flashed then, a quick burst of scorn quickly tamped down. “So you’re Harry, then.” 

_Obviously_ , Harry wanted to say, if it wasn’t for the slight motion that Draco made beside him, the barest flinch away from his father. He swallowed down his sarcasm, settled for a half-hearted “Nice to meet you, sir.” 

Lucius didn't bother to acknowledge him. He turned away, a quick motion of his hand; with a jolt Harry realized he was gesturing to Draco, taking him away. “We’re leaving.”

“Father, we just won our relay. Can’t I just - “

“Now.”

Draco closed his eyes; _Stay_ , Harry wanted to whisper, even as he knew Draco wouldn’t. He thought of hollow eyes and bent spines, photo-negatives and fading away.

“Bye,” Draco whispered to Harry, and then he was gone, following his father, leaving Harry standing alone amongst the crowd of people. 

~

Harry stares out the windshield, at the line of cars stretching out into the distance and he wants to put his hand through the window. They’ve basically come to a stop - windows cracked down, the distant thump of music playing from a nearby car. Draco wasn’t even bothering to keep his hands on the wheel; he rested his head against one arm, foot inching forward every few minutes. The sun glints against metal and glass, a dizzying array of lights, a pale rendition of the stars. 

He swallows. He could practically feel the tension in the car, mixed in with the heat and underlined with frustration. Everything’s too silent - there’s no music playing, no idle chatter to while away the time. It’s just them - Draco at the wheel, Harry curled at the side, the memories between them like a chasm. 

The sound of a bang startles him; Draco’s slammed his palm against the dashboard. Every line in his body is tense, muscles drawn tight. Harry watches him and thinks of a dive, hunched over the blocks, staring into the water. 

“Fuck,” Draco says, low and hoarse. His fingers are vicious, white-knuckled against his hair. “We’re so backed up.”

Harry lets out a long breath. It’s the first thing Draco’s said in almost two hours, since leaving the field this morning. “We’re near the city. Rush hour traffic, maybe.” 

“Fuck,” Draco says again. God, even his voice sounded tense, the words so clipped that Harry barely recognized him. 

Harry bites his lip, hard enough that he tastes blood. “We’ll be fine. I’m sure it’s just rush hour. It’ll clear up in the next hour or so. Don’t worry.” 

Draco looks at him then, near-incredulous. “You think I’m worried about the jam?” 

Harry feels his stomach sink. It’s an odd echoing feeling, a stone dropped down a well, shot through with the bitter taste of guilt. His mouth tastes like salt and metal. “No. I don’t.”

Silence. Idle motors, distant radios. Draco, washed out with anger and coloured with stress and Harry still couldn’t keep his eyes away. 

“I told you,” Draco says, his voice soft. “Ages ago. I told you that all we could ever be was friends.” 

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, the words gibberish in his mouth. He’s lost track of how many times he’s said it, syllables disintegrating between his lips until all that was left was ash. “I - I forgot - “

“You _can’t_ \- “ 

Something rises up in his chest then, a mash of emotions, a knot in his throat. “What does it matter?” Harry says, his voice hard. “What does any of this matter? It’ll all be over soon anyway.” 

Draco turns fully to face him then. It’s both better and worse - Harry stares into Draco’s eyes, swirling silver and dark pupils. If it was all going to go to shit, Harry wanted to at least watch Draco wreck him. 

“What does it matter,” Draco echoes, incredulous, then laughs. “You really think we’re not - that I wouldn’t try -”

“No,” Harry says, “I don’t. Why would you? Why would you try to keep this, this - whatever this is. Friendship? Relationship? Why would you bother? Why would you try?” 

“Don’t,” Draco says, his voice impossibly calm. “Don’t try and pin this on me.”

Harry scoffs then. He leans closer, braces his elbows on the console. Draco doesn’t move - he doesn’t do anything, actually, eyes impossibly wide, pupils blown out. “It’s not fair. You can’t - “

“I can’t _what_?”

“This.” Harry gestures, towards everything and nothing and the two of them together. “You - you can’t let me touch you, fall asleep on my shoulder, race me in the ocean, talk to me about _falling in fucking love_ and then turn around and tell me to stop. You can’t expect me not to - not to - “

Draco’s face has gone white. He’s shock-still in the driver's seat, eyes fixed straight ahead. “You don’t get to be the one to say that.”

“Just…” Harry trails off. He watches the swing of sea glass in the back, the gentle clink against the windows. “Make up your mind,” he whispers, and he can barely hear himself over the sound of dry wind and cars against the road. “If you tell me to stop I will. If you tell me to do anything I’ll do it. You know I would.”

The hum of the engine. The tap of fingernails. Music from Draco’s headphones - tinny and faint; he must have taken them out at some point during the drive, let them fall to the seat in a tangle of white cords. Harry reaches for them, fingers aching to move, to do _something_. Draco grabs his wrist before he can touch them. “It’s not that simple. You think I...that I don’t want…”

“I don’t know what you want,” Harry says quietly, and he watches Draco flinch back. “And I don’t think you know either.”

Draco lets go. There’s red marks on Harry’s wrist, lines where Draco’s fingertips dug against the delicate skin, pressed into the space where veins arched underneath the surface. He looks like a statue, cast in bronze and weathered by rain. Harry tears his eyes away, looks down at his hands. 

They sit like that for a bit. The car inches forward - an endless line of vehicles, stretching out into the distance. Horns blared from somewhere vaguely behind them, another buffer slid between the tension. Harry leans his arm outside the window, presses his palm against the burning heat of the metal, takes a deep breath and thinks the air smells like ash. 

“You’re right,” Draco says. He switches lanes; Harry’s body presses against the door, the handle digging into his ribcage. The sun hangs just above them, baking the roof of the car and them inside of it. “I don’t - I don’t know what I want.” 

Harry’s mouth tastes like blood. He prods the torn skin with his tongue, marks from where he’s bitten down too hard on his lip. “No shit.” 

Draco smiles then, a quirk of his lips, something bitter and humorless. “What else can I do?” 

“Figure it out,” Harry says; Draco cuts a harsh gaze back onto the road. “Stop dragging everything on. Make up your damn mind and stick to it.” 

He takes a deep breath. The car moves forward, the air thick and syrupy, a headache in corporal form.

“Oh Harry,” Draco murmurs, his voice impossibly soft. “You think I haven’t tried?”

~

Their car breaks down. It was bound to happen, Harry thinks bitterly, as Draco slams the hood shut and kicks at the side of the road. Of course it had to happen now, on the side of the near-empty highway, the sun blazing down on the two of them. Of course it had to happen amidst all the tension, stilted silences and weighted pauses, Draco determinedly avoiding Harry’s eyes. 

“What the fuck,” he mutters, his voice cracking slightly at the end. “What the actual fuck.”

Draco shoots him an annoyed glare. His face is flushed from the sun; dimly Harry remembers the paleness of Draco’s skin, the way he burned instead of tanned, neck and shoulders turning sunset red. “Why don’t you say it another fifty times. Maybe it’ll magically jump start the engine.” 

Harry doesn’t bother to reply. He stares up at the sky - there’s not a single cloud to be seen, nothing to pray to in hopes of covering the sun. The light makes him dizzy, heat waves radiating off the asphalt and the dry grass around him. “We’re fucked. Gas station was at least an hour back.” 

Draco wrenches open the hood again, slams it down. The noise echoes around them, eerie in the silence. “ _Jesus_ ,” he spits, with surprising vehemence. “In the middle of fucking nowhere too.”

Harry just shakes his head. He leans his head back on the roof of the car, the sun cooking his skin, burning his body. For a moment he thinks of last night, the two of them curled up on the hood of the car, Draco’s head on Harry’s shoulder. It’s burned into his memory - the curve of Draco’s neck, the brush of his hair against Harry’s cheek and the flutter of his eyelashes against Harry’s neck. 

The dream fades away though, replaced with the burning sun and the heaviness of Draco’s eyes. Harry scrubs a hand over his face - the heat wasn’t helping to take the edge off his anger.

Draco’s hand swims into his vision - Harry realizes he’s holding a bottle of water. He accepts it gratefully - the water’s warm but better than nothing. He swallows down half of it then passes the bottle back; Draco takes it but doesn’t drink. He instead stares at the opening, the small plastic ridges where the cap screwed on. 

“Do you have service?” 

Harry digs his phone out of his pocket - the screen is slippery with sweat and he has to shield it with one hand just to make out the numbers. He’s on 14 percent he realizes as he slides it back into his pocket. “No.” 

“How long do you think it’ll be?”

Harry squints up at the sky. “Ages. The highway’s fucking empty.” 

Silence. It’s so, so quiet - the rasping of grass blades, rocks tumbling across the road. The creak of the car when Draco pulls himself across it, legs too close to Harry’s. He closes his eyes, tries to ignore the searing presence of Draco’s skin. 

“This is shit enough without us fighting.” 

“We’re not fighting,” Draco says shortly and sets the bottle down between them. He’s holding the cap; it cuts a circle into his palm, red lines visible across the skin. 

Harry reaches for something to wrap his fingers around, stave off some of the tension, the nervous energetic ricocheting through his body. “Could’ve fooled me.” 

Draco laughs, unexpected in the slow heat. “If you think this is fighting you should have seen my parents.”

The words are heavy enough that Harry almost feels it, rigid tension that goes down his spine. “You’re so fucking mitigatory,” he says, through clenched teeth and a tight throat. “That’s a great idea, actually. Let’s just not talk about it. Let’s just wait until we blow up _exactly like your parents_ and maybe _then_ you’ll admit that something’s wrong.” 

“Don’t talk about my parents,” Draco warns. Plastic cracks under his hands, knuckles bone white and tense. “If you saw what they were like when they fought - “

“Jesus Christ,” Harry swears. He braces his hands against the windscreen, glass searing into palm. Draco refuses to look at him - he’s staring off somewhere into the distance, eyes wide and empty. “Your parents are fucked, Draco. They’re not the fucking standard! How can you keep comparing - “ 

“They’re all I know,” Draco says, softly. He takes a deep breath, shoulders shuddering, back still ramrod straight. “Who else can I compare them to?” 

Silence. Dry air and the blazing sun. Heat wraps scalding fingers around Harry’s anger, burns it all to dust. A pit of something oily settles in his stomach. 

He reaches for his hoodie, sleeves tied around his waist to prevent his ass from burning. There’s dust all over the top of the car, dead insects and dirt. He draws a shape, a meaningless squiggle and wishes for rain.

“Do you remember when you first got your license?” 

Harry turns; Draco has his hands pillowed underneath his head, face turned towards Harry. His shirt sticks to him with sweat; Harry can see all the bones of his ribs, the dips and the arches, the hint of muscle and tendon and skin. “Yeah.” 

Draco shrugs. Harry doesn’t watch the rise and fall of his shoulders. “You took me for a drive, remember? Downtown?”

Harry remembers buildings and crosswalks and rain streaking lights into meaningless lines. He remembers the brick walls of tiny alleyways, Draco’s feet propped up on the dashboard, music blaring from the stereo. Draco had protested, of course - “ _Jesus, if I wanted to listen to men fast-talking I would have turned on the fucking radio -_ “ but Harry had ignored him. “ _My car, my rules,_ ” he had said, and Draco had rolled his eyes. 

The memory fades in and out, a patchwork of recollections. He thinks of Draco two years later, sunlight in his hair and stars at his back, mountains instead of condos, highways instead of alleys. Draco got his license right after Harry did, despite his birthday being earlier, but he’d always let Harry drive. 

“I remember,” Harry says, and his voice sounds uneven and unsteady, a wooden rowboat balanced on rocky waves. “What about it?” 

“Just…” Draco trails off. “You could have taken anyone. Why me?” 

“Does it matter?” There had been thousands of drives after that one - with Draco and without. He’d driven for five hours with Ron and Hermione last summer, up to Sirius and Remus’ house in the mountains. This was hardly his first road trip.

And yet Harry looked at the sky and dead grass and cracking asphalt and thought _nothing else has ever been as beautiful as this._

Draco stretches out, hands above him in a loose rendition of a streamline, long lines of his body pulled out. “I don’t know. Maybe I give meaning to things that don’t deserve it.” 

It feels like a jab at him. Harry bristles, flares up with irritation. A car passes by them in a cloud of dust and smoke; he sticks his hand out, tries to flag it down. It rumbles off into the distance, disappears behind the horizon. “Shit.”

“They’ll find our bodies here,” Draco says, in a detached sort of way. “Bones bleached by the sun, flesh torn off by crows. _If only someone could have helped them, those poor two boys. They will be remembered_.” 

“Dramatic bastard.” 

Draco offers him a tiny smile. 

The minutes race by, suspended in the air between them. Harry stares at the cracks in the asphalt. “I think I was jealous of you,” he says; Draco blinks at him in surprise. “When I was a kid. You were always so bloody good at everything. That stupid freestyle drill - “

“High elbows?”

“ - and the fly one, with that impossible timing - “

Draco laughs. “I liked single arm.” 

“You always got everything right. When Coach used to make you demo and I’d stand at the edge of the pool and fucking _hate_ you.” 

He laughs at the memory - thirteen years old, watching Draco’s underwater dolphin kicks, the perfect breakout, the entry of his hands into the water. Elbowing Ron in the side - “What a prick,” he muttered, and Ron had snorted and tried to shove him in. 

“You always beat me in kick,” Draco points out. 

“That’s because you _sucked_. Legitimately, actually sucked. And Pansy thrashed us all in kick sets anyway so I don’t think being able to beat you warrants any kind of celebration.” 

“True,” Draco muses thoughtfully. “But I ended up breaking 37 after all.”

Harry smirks. He holds up his hand to shade his eyes, the sun making everything too bright and too saturated. “Isn’t it weird that we won’t go back? That we’ll come home and...and leave and we might not ever see each other again?” 

Draco exhales, slightly unsteadily. “I don’t - you’d come back though, right? For holidays?” 

Harry holds his gaze. “Would you?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” 

“Don’t tell me you’d come back for your parents.”

Draco swallows. The heat has burnt his shoulders, the spaces where skin peeked out from under his shirt. Harry wants to run his fingers against the red. “I wouldn’t,” he agrees. “But maybe I’d come back for you.”

He’s done it again. Harry feels the tension between them draw taught again, a pull behind his core. Draco doesn’t drop his gaze - it’s burning and steady, the shine of the stars at dawn. “Draco - “

He tears his gaze away - a truck slows in front of them, the window rolling down. A man pokes his head out, scruffy beard and a bandana. “You kids need help?”

“Thank god,” Draco mutters; he’s off the hood in an instant, heading over to the open window. “Yes please! Our car broke down and - “

Their voices fade to background noise, whispers compared to the noise in Harry’s head. Dimly he realizes his phone in his hand - 2:30 pm it reads, and Harry realizes with a jolt that they’ve been out here for more than two hours. 

It hadn’t felt like it, on the roof, drunk on memories. It hadn’t felt like any time at all.

Everything passes in a blur; jumper cables, batteries. Harry wrenches the ignition as far as it would go until the engine spluttered and roared to life. The rush of air-con, the click of seatbelts, Draco sliding into the driver's seat. He leans over; Harry shoots him a curious look and Draco smiles as he flicks the radio on. He hands his phone to Harry - “Play something?” 

He almost laughs when he opens Draco’s Spotify - he has his own playlist. Granted, it’s called _Harry’s Rap Idiots_ but it still makes him smile anyway. He doesn’t click on it though, instead finds the same music they’ve been listening to, the ones with high chords and low bass, the kind that sounds like dusty skies and warm air and road trips. It’s the kind of song that whispered of nostalgia, things that hadn’t happened yet, memories half-faded with time. Draco slides him a half-smile, the barest tilt of his lips but Harry knows it’s a peace offering anyways. 

He takes a deep breath. The car feels looser now, more open. He slides Draco’s phone into the cup holder and stares out the window. “Good to go?”

Draco grins. “Let’s go,” he says, and the car peels back onto the road. 

~

Harry’s never really liked museums. They’ve always reminded him of mausoleums, that odd space between dead and alive. He remembers going to one once, seeing the half-rotten cloth of a doll from Ancient Rome, the sudden coldness that washed over his body as he realized that _that child was dead_. 

Draco loved museums, though. Harry wondered if he found it comforting, to be surrounded so viscerally by humanity, to realize that the earth was covered in the remnants of people’s past lives. 

So they stop at the museum just out of town - it’s a natural museum, specializing in rocks and minerals and fossils. It’s practically empty - not surprising, given that they were an hour and a half out from closing. Harry lets Draco drag him through it though, into rooms that looked like hidden jewels, black walls and wooden floors, artifacts illuminated with spotlights. He stares at a slab of rock on a pedestal, the faintest curve of a leaf embedded into the stone. 

Draco stands halfway across the room, bent over a glass display case. There’s a number of semi-precious stones there, underneath the glittering lights of the room. Harry watched Draco brush his fingers over the glass, eyes wide open as he read all the labels and something impossibly fond lights in his chest.

The next room is smaller. Artifacts, Harry realizes - clay pots and woven nets, figurines and photographs. There’s a handful of shards displayed under glass, dark lines where whatever coloured pigment had worn off. If he squints he thinks he can make out the shape of figures - the curve of a limb, the shadow of a head. He stares at the jagged lines of the shard, the smear where someone had dragged their finger too deeply into the clay. 

“It's funny, isn’t it?” Draco says. Harry looks over; Draco’s watching him, eyes like those chips of gems in the glass cabinet previously. “How people are remembered. You go your whole life hoping you’ll make your mark in some way but who knows? Maybe you’ll be remembered in the curve of a clay pot, in the pages of someone’s diary. Maybe you won’t be remembered at all. The world keeps going and going and one day you stop going with it.” 

Harry stares at the small label on the wall, though he doesn’t actually see any of the letters. He’s too busy focusing on Draco, a pillar of fire standing behind him, all flames and ichor. “Morbid.”

“You don’t find it fascinating?” Draco’s hands splay out on the glass, casting an elongated shadow against the display. “One day, when we’re all dead, maybe whenever inherits this Earth will remember you. Maybe you’ll be another boy in a photo, remembered only because that’s all they could find of humanity.” 

“It seems lonely.”

Draco smiles. “That’s how memories work, I guess.” 

Harry stares - broken pots, distorted shadows, the curve of Draco’s mouth. “I’d rather be remembered by people, I think. Maybe that’s how you survive. Little pieces of you carried by someone else.”

He once read a story, somewhere, about a girl whose soul was ripped in two. How she kept one half of it but gave the other to her lover, and for as long as she lived she was protected not only by herself but by the one she loved as well. He wonders if that’s how life worked - little pieces given to other people, secrets spread out all over the world. He wonders if that’s how he’ll be remembered, in pieces, never to be whole again. 

One day Harry would be dead, his body blown to dust. The world would turn, the stars dying, the sky falling and the only thing that would be remembered of him was the memories passed down by the people he’d loved.

He thinks of Draco then. Draco, with all his fire and his light, the way he burnt up from the inside. The small things - his hatred of coffee, his love of noodles. The tiny pieces that made up a person, that made someone real and not a story. The pieces that were so easily left behind, as insubstantial as the ghost of a woman left behind in clay. 

Harry looks at his fingers and he _aches_ at the thought of Draco being forgotten. 

“Harry?” Draco says, and Harry realizes he’s been staring blankly off at the wall, fingers braced on the glass. 

“Sorry,” he mutters. He yanks his hood over his head - suddenly he feels very, very cold. “Are we leaving?” 

Draco stops at the gift store briefly. He buys socks, a magnet, a handful of polished stones that glittered in the light. Harry watches him slip them into his pocket - he knows he’ll find them hanging on the mobile next morning. Draco holds one out to him as they head for the car park - it’s a dark orange, almost luminous in the fading light. “Cat’s eye,” he says, and Harry slips the cool stone in between his fingers. He wonders if Draco had taken a chunk from the sun. 

~ 

Night had fallen by the time they get to the motel. It’s too late to bother trying to get food - they mutually agree to another round of instant noodles. Harry can practically taste the salt and msg on his lips as they head up the dusty stairs, the carpet sticking to the bottom of their feet. 

The room is small - one bed (there only ever seemed to be one.) The covers are some horrifying clash of green with a red floral print, the blankets thin and vaguely stiff. The lights flicker above them, electricity buzzing and washing everything out. 

Draco let’s Harry shower first - he’s taken his collection down from the car, tumbled spools of thread onto the bed sheets. Harry leaves him there and heads into the bathroom - everything seems oddly yellowed and he scowls at himself in the mirror. He looks different somehow, though he can’t quite figure out what it is. 

The shower is shit - the water fluctuates between burning hot and freezing and Harry gives up hoping from one side of the tub to the other. He grits his teeth and stands under the spray, muscles tensing under the icy water and tries not to think longingly of his bathtub at home. 

When he comes back out Draco’s brow is furrowed in concentration. There’s an elaborate cradle of knots laid out on the bed - Harry supposed it was hard to thread stones onto string. He barely notices Harry, doesn’t even acknowledge him until Harry’s on the bed next to him, peering over his shoulder. 

“What?”

“I’m doing laundry,” Harry says. He plucks at Draco’s hoodie with one hand; Draco scowls petulantly. “We haven’t done it for at least a week.”

“Is there even a washing - “

“Ground floor. There’s a vending machine next to it, apparently. We can get Gatorade too. Pretend we’re at a meet again.” 

Draco rolls his eyes but he gets up off the bed. They both carry their bags down, double handfuls of spilling cotton and soft cloth. Harry swipes his card against the reader; he shoves his clothes in, feeds quarters until the door clicks shut and begins to whirl. 

“Hand me the detergent?” Draco says, and he snatches the plastic bag from Harry’s hand. It’s funny, Harry thinks - Draco’s always had such a distinct scent to him. It was gone now, ever since they started this road trip, ever since Harry’s clothes and Draco’s smelled exactly the same. 

The clothes whirl round and round. Draco pushes himself up onto the machine, legs folded underneath him, head leaned back against the yellow wall. From this angle Harry can see the arc of his neck, the cut of his jawline and the dig of his teeth -

He looks away, hurriedly. Draco doesn’t seem to notice though - his eyes are half shut, his hair ghostly in the flickering lights. 

“Do you want something?” Harry says, anything to distract himself. He gestures vaguely outside to the vending machine, the colourful lights fluorescent in the darkness. Draco shrugs. One hand is up by his throat - he’s playing with the coin, Harry realizes, the silver-bright flash of metal catching on the light in the spaces between Draco’s fingers. 

“I’ll share with you, if you’re getting anything?”

“It’ll be Sprite,” Harry warns. Draco just laughs. 

Outside Harry feels like he can think a bit better, away from the hum of the washing machine, the arch of Draco’s body. He sucks in a lungful of air, warm and dusty. It feels almost stereotypically summer - that strange huskiness to the wind that only ever appeared at night. He looks up at the stars and searches - it takes a few seconds but he finds Draco’s stars just barely hidden under the edge of the roof. It’s become a bit of a routine for him now - the lines of Draco’s constellation have practically been burned into his memory. 

Harry forces himself to turn away. He shoves coins into the machine until it spits out a bottle at him - the plastic is sticky, damp from condensation and he dries it off with his sleeve. 

Inside Draco looks as if he’s fallen asleep, head tilted against the corner of the room. He cracks open his eyes at the sound of the door opening, silver against the golden tumble of his hair. 

“Ugh. Back already?”

“I got a drink, not a bloody house.” Harry passes the Sprite to Draco - he chugs down a mouthful almost mechanically, grimacing slightly at the fizz. He blinks up at him - Draco looks exhausted, eyes drooping and fluttering shut. Harry studies his eyelashes - he remembers the feel of them against his skin. “Don’t sleep,” he says, softly. “Draco? Don’t go to sleep.”

“Why?” Draco murmurs. His face is buried behind his hands, sleeves pulled down to form half-paws over his fingers. “‘M so tired.” 

“Just wait for a bit,” Harry says. The washing machines have stopped; he yanks out an armful of wet fabric, shoves it into the dryer. He adds Draco’s clothes in too, slams the door shut and feeds it more coins. “We’re almost done washing the clothes. You can sleep afterwards. In a bed, instead of on top of the washing machine.”

Draco grumbles. “I slept on the bleachers at Nationals.”

“Yeah, sure. But who had to listen to you bitch about your sore shoulders for the entire day after that?” 

Draco mutters something intelligible. His fingers tangle on the cord slung around his neck - a pang of curiosity shoots through Harry at the sight. He remembers their conversation in the car, only two days ago - _‘No point hoping for something that could never happen,’_ he’d said, and Draco had only smiled.

He takes the bottle back from Draco’s limp fingers. He thinks he’ll always associate Sprite with this road trip, the flat taste of sugar and lemon, the fizz on his tongue. It bubbles on the way down, burning his throat. 

He doesn’t know how long it takes for the dryer cycle to finish. All he knows is that Draco looks well and truly asleep - head braced on his knees, the curve of his spine an aching wave tearing into Harry’s chest.

The floor digs slightly into his kneecaps as he systematically yanks clothing out of the dryer. It’s still a little damp - the edges of sleeves and the hems especially - but Harry can’t bring himself to care. He gathers it all up in his arms anyway - Draco obediently follows him up to their room, fingers trailing and catching on the oddest things - the corners of the hallways, the drapes that shielded windows. He gets them into their room; Draco practically faceplants onto the bed and Harry lets him. It had been a psychotic day, with the fights and the museum and car breaking down. Draco deserved some rest. 

He tidies up the room a bit - pushes suitcases against the wall, sits down cross-legged on the floor and sorts the piles of laundry into their bags. It’s all practically the same stuff - sweatpants, hoodies, socks. He holds up a sweatshirt, faded grey and blotchy, the colour partially bleached out around the neckline. He wasn’t sure if it was his or Draco’s. 

The sound of Draco’s steady breaths grounds him. Harry chances a look - he’s got the blankets pulled over and around him. The faintest strip of light falls across his face, a strip of the moon against the curve of Draco’s cheekbone. He watches the flutter of Draco’s hair, the steady pulse at his throat and Harry wants to press his lips against it. 

He’s always been scared of drowning. It was ironic, being a swimmer and all, but all of Harry’s nightmares featured him underwater, the slam of his heart against his chest, the way the world narrowed down to the slowly-dying throb in his veins. 

He looks at Draco and he thinks that drowning felt like falling in love. It’s the same - heartbeats and choking and the twist of his stomach. The desperate spin of the world around him, an unmoored boat on rocky waves. Harry’s fingers dig into the carpet, nails buried deep into the scratch fibers. 

He forces himself to get into bed. It’s warm - Draco must have just rolled over. There’s only two pillows - they usually slept with pillows stacked in the middle, leftover habits from swim meets. Draco’s already using one though; Harry grits his teeth and flips over on his side, rolls right to the very edge and puts as much space between their bodies as possible.

“Goodnight,” he whispers, to the silent room. 

He closes his eyes and lets himself sink.

~

They left two weeks ago. Six in the morning - Harry had pulled up at Draco’s house before the sun rose, the air silent and still. Everything was spotless - the space in the trunk for Draco’s suitcase, the seats vacuumed of crumbs and aired out. The radio lay dark and silent; it was too early for rap, for anything, really.

Harry thumbed through his phone - his text thread with Draco was still open. He scrolled down - his last message that he sent to Draco was simple. _Are you sure you want to do this?_

_yes_ , Draco wrote back. Harry stared at the words for a moment, everything that it symbolized, everything he couldn’t have. 

Almost reluctantly he pressed the dial. Draco hated mornings - they’ve had too many swim meets where he’d slept through the alarms, head buried under his pillow. Harry usually ended up having to wake him up - shaking his limp body back and forth, fingers curled around bare shoulders and thumbs pressed into scapulas.

He wasn’t expecting Draco to pick up, so the click of the phone connecting was a surprise. “Hey,” he said, into the dark screen of his phone. His own face stared back at him, eyes distorted and stretched out. “I’m outside.”

“Coming,” Draco replied. Harry frowned - he sounded wide awake, voice too tense to be natural. “One minute.”

“Are you - “

The phone clicked off. Harry stared down at his screen before swearing and shoving it into his pocket. He wrenched the door open - the morning air was cool against his face, everything tinged with silver and blue. Draco’s house was huge and ancient, all dark wood and stone. It was built like a traditional manor, angled roofs, thick windows, heavy glass. He’d never liked the house - it always seemed haunted, a mausoleum of memories. 

He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do - march over to Draco’s front door, yell the street down? The windows were all dark; Harry found himself scanning them, looking for just the slightest hint that Draco was coming, that he was ready to leave. 

He took a deep breath - the air always smelled different in the mornings, dew and leaves and rain clouds. Harry leaned against the car, fingers trailing over the metal and tried not to think about the open road, the colour of the sky, Draco in the seat next to him. He wonders if they’ll make it - it’s the longest he’s ever driven with anyone before and he’s scared shitless that they might fight. 

He wasn’t aware that he zoned out until he heard the crash of Draco’s front door flying open, ricocheting off the wall before swinging to a tentative stop. He had to drag his attention from the spill of Draco’s hair underneath his beanie, shoved his suitcase in the back and let Draco slide into the seat next to him. “Hurry,” he said, and Harry peeled out of the driveway, the stars just barely present to bear witness. 

They drove past the pool - he was almost tempted to pull into the parking lot, just for the nostalgia factor. Draco had his nose pressed almost against the glass, fog spreading across the window. He looked quiet, somehow, curled in on himself. Harry frowned, ignored the twist in his stomach, the bitter taste of guilt. “Did your parents try and stop you?”

Draco nodded. He cracked a smile - a small one, sardonic and cutting. “Who cares. We’re off now, right? And so it begins?” 

Harry swallowed. Draco’s face was false-bright, the mask he only ever pulled on when talking about his parents. He wanted to take Draco’s face in his hands, smooth out the creases in his brown and eyes, take away that burden he carried alone on his shoulders. He wanted to reach over, brush Draco’s hand with his own, watch the sun rise and pretend everything was okay.

It wasn’t though. All Harry had were memories and wishes, vague hopes for the boy sitting next to him. He looks up at the vanishing stars and wonders how many of his hidden pleas would come true.

~

“Harry. Psst, Harry.”

“Fuck you,” Harry mutters. The bed is lumpy, the covers itchy against his legs. He rolls over, pulls the blankets up over his shoulders.

“Harry.” There’s the sound of scuffling, and then Draco’s hands are on Harry’s chest, shaking him back and forth. He yelps - Draco’s hands are ice-cold, pressing into his skin. 

“Fuck!” Harry swears. He sits up - the hotel room is dark, the only light from the tiny clock on the side table. Draco’s on top of him, legs slotted on either side of Harry. His eyes shine in the darkness, silver stars, matched only by the coin around his neck. 

The creaking of the building. The hum of the fridge. Draco’s even breaths, loud in the silence. He looks like a ghost, half-faded and washed out, a distant memory of a boy immortalized in metal. 

Harry looks at him and he drowns. 

“Wake up.” Draco’s voice is low and gravely. He had obviously just woken up. 

“It’s three in the morning. Go away.”

Draco reaches down again, wraps his cold fingers against the ball of Harry’s shoulder. His fingers dig into the soft muscle there, hard enough to make Harry blink the sleep out of his eyes. 

“Let's go swimming.” 

“You’ve lost it,” Harry says. Draco hovers above him, his constellation come to life. “I’m so done with you.”

“Please?” Draco asks, voice catching slightly. He grins, Cheshire-like, the glint of his teeth and the tilt of his head.

Harry thinks he would light the ocean on fire for that smile. He’d go to the ends of the earth, burn the world to the ground if Draco asked him to. 

They end up padding down carpeted hallways, towels slung around their necks. The door is half-stuck - Draco has to jam his shoulder into the frame. It flies open and smashes against the far wall, the noise echoing around the pool deck, hard tiles and walls, flickering lights and windows. Harry crans his head back to stare at the skylight - he can just catch a glimpse of the moon. 

“This is such a bad idea,” he mutters under his breath. Draco just laughs, dumps his towel onto the chaise lounge and slips his legs into the water. The pool is narrow, a deformed rectangle with one side warped and wavy. One of the lights seemed to be broken, the other barely flickering with a yellowish glow. He grimaces. “You’re going to get fucking electrocuted.”

Draco grins, unconcerned. He kicks his legs idly, a vague suggestion of breaststroke. Harry watches the ripples spread over the water, spiralling out to the concrete walls. “Are you getting in?”

Harry rolls his eyes and shoves Draco. He goes in with a shriek, water spraying everywhere, a graceless tumble of long limbs and curse words. Harry hops back to avoid the splash of water, waves lapping at the sides of the pool, echoing off walls. 

He lines himself up at the edge, toes curled around the rim. Draco’s spinning around underwater; he comes for Harry with a devilish look that Harry can see even from up here. When he wraps cold fingers around Harry’s ankle Harry doesn’t protest; he lets himself be dragged into the pool.

The cold water closes over his head. It’s freezing but not too bad - he’s used to pool decks at five in the morning before the heaters kicked in, doors flung wide open to let in fresh air. Draco’s fingers are still wrapped around his ankle - he kicks out teasingly, laughs as Draco digs his nails into the ball of his ankle. 

They surface together. The pool is shallow - the water reaches the bottom of Harry’s ribs, the floor smooth underneath his feet. Draco cards wet hands through wet hair and Harry feels his chest twist. He’s not used to seeing Draco like this - cap and goggles gone, head tilted up at the ceiling, water dripping down his shoulders and back. The pool reflects ghostly light up into his face, shades of aquamarine and cyan, ripples of silver and white. Draco stares back at him - his eyes are wide, lips slightly parted and Harry tears his eyes away. 

They float on their backs for a bit. “I don’t even know what to do,” Draco says and Harry chuckles - it’s strange not having a set on the board, not having to constantly reach for fins or a kick board. The water leeches the heat from Harry’s skin. He shivers and Draco looks over at him, flicks his eyes up and down then looks away. 

“Let’s race.” 

“What, here?” Harry gestures - they’ve floated into one of the curves along the side of the pool. He runs a finger along the wet tiles. “This is like half the size of a regular pool. Plus the sides are all fucked.” 

“Just stay to the right then. There and back. It’s a bloody 25.” 

Harry swallows. The lights glimmer back at him, turning the water of the pool a bottle green. He drags his fingers across the surface. 

“Aw,” Draco says, and _this_ , Harry thinks. This is what always got him - the roll of the words against his mouth, the throatiness of his voice. Draco braces his arms on the wall, leans forward just a bit and Harry already knows what he’s going to say, knows from the gleam in his eyes, the tilt of lips. “Scared Potter?” he whispers, and Harry’s too far gone to resist. 

They line up at the end of the pool together, toes curled over the edge, fingers braced on the floor. Harry hasn’t done a dive in what felt like months - his back creaks as he bends down, arms taught and tense. He doesn’t look at Draco next to him, doesn’t study the curve of his spine and the build of his legs, the bones in his wrist as he shifted slightly, fingers braced on the tiled floor. 

“On your mark…” Draco whispers, and time slows like it always does. It’s the bite of anticipation, the curl of nerves in his stomach, the way the world seemed to stretch and bend and fade into the water in front of him. Knowing that the swim would always end the same, hunched over the side of the pool, chest heaving, shoulder shaking, body _aching_ from exhaustion and still diving in anyway.

The minute Draco says “Go,” Harry dives. The pool is shallow enough that he nearly scrapes his nose on the floor, the bottom rushing up at him in a flurry of bubbles and white concrete. The water seems to slip from his hands - two weeks without training made his shoulders and lungs burn. He can feel Draco beside him - the lack of a lane rope meant that they were so much closer than normal, close enough that his hand brushed Draco’s ribs when he took a stroke. Everything’s blurry - neither of them have goggles, nothing beyond vague and foggy shapes but Harry can still make out Draco’s hair, a golden cloud around them. 

The wall rushes up at him. They flip turn nearly at the same time, Harry thinks - it’s too hard to tell with them being so close. He lingers at the wall for just a moment - Draco’s beautiful in the water, measured strokes and fluid movements, rhythmic and steady. Harry thinks of his own freestyle and snorts as he chases after him.

He touches the wall just after Draco - it would have been more had Harry not absolutely sprinted the finish. It’s not enough though; Draco pulls himself to the edge, ankles submerged in the water, forearms braced on his knees. The light slides off his damp skin, droplets of liquid Mercury and silver on his shoulders. He hadn’t taken off his necklace Harry realizes - it gleams darkly in the hollow of his throat. “Sprints my ass,” Draco says, the laughter audible in the timber of his voice. “You just lost a 25 Free.” 

_I let you win_ , Harry thinks. He stops the words before they come out - he knows he’d sound too hoarse, too unhinged. Draco’s eyes darken.

They stay like that for a bit - Draco propped up on the edge of the pool, Harry still in the water. He traces lines with his eyes - over Draco’s shoulders, his ribs, his wrists. He’s silhouetted by the stars - Harry can just glimpse them through the skylight, a halo of constellations and galaxies in the swirl of Draco’s hair. Water. Rain, oceans, pools. Emotions bubble up in Harry’s throat, caught between his teeth and it always happened near water. Everything happened near water. 

“What did you wish for?” Harry breathes, barely audible over the echos. He reaches out, finger hovering just above Draco’s coin. The stars wink back at him, a visceral reminder of his own prayers whispered into the dead of the night. 

The barest twitch of Draco’s lips. The way his breathing hitched when Harry closed his fingers around the coin, pressed it so hard into his palm that he thought it might be branded there forever.

“I think you know,” Draco says, his voice impossibly hoarse. 

Harry closes his eyes. Takes in shaking breaths, one after another. Everything is spinning too fast, the world falling to pieces around him, the stars glittering rain against his skin. 

He’s still not touching Draco, though he can feel the heat of his body against his skin. Draco’s head is bowed, arms braced on the wall beside him. “Tell me to stop.” 

Draco. It always was Draco, the constant weight of him at Harry’s side, the steadiness and the vividness and the way he spun stories into sugar and blew it all to dust. It was all the swim meets and all the hotel rooms, the late night drives and the ramen, fighting over music on the way over the bridge to morning practice. It was them at twelve years old, all the arrogant posturing of children and the hidden undertones of admiration.

Draco slides his gaze up to meet Harry’s. “No,” he says, and then he tugs Harry forward and kisses him. 

He’s always thought of Draco as calculated, composed, elegant in that impossible sort of way. Draco’s always been a Prince of Stars, beautiful because he was unobtainable, because Harry would only ever be able to look at him and wish. 

But Draco pressed his lips against Harry’s and all Harry could think was _oh_. 

Draco kisses like he’s desperate, like the world was burning, and if Draco was ice he kisses Harry like he was fire. He kisses like he talks, deliberate and careful, too fast for Harry to keep up. It’s the way closes his eyes, lashes against Harry’s cheekbones, the way his hair feels underneath Harry’s fingers, the way Harry slots himself up against the wall, lets the water lap around his body, the cold of the water burnt away by the fire at Draco’s fingertips. 

When they finally pull away for air Harry feels dizzy. Draco stares back up at him - his cheeks are flushed, lips red and kiss-swollen. “God,” he says, voice broken. “I didn’t…” 

He looks radiant. He always looked radiant but it’s the first time that Harry could tell him so, could wrap his hand around the coin and tug Draco closer, pull him into the water and press him against the side. Draco smiles underneath Harry’s lips, fingers curling into his hair and between them Harry closes his fingers around the coin in his palm, holds the memory of Draco’s wish in his hand. 

And when he searches for the stars above them, when he tries to find Draco where it was burned into the sky Harry closes his eyes and mouths _Thank You_. 

~

Afterwards they lie on the bed, tangled blankets and folded pillows. The arch of Draco’s foot pressed into Harry’s ankle, the water from his hair soaking through his shirt. Harry lies on his back, Draco’s face turned into his neck, a memory of morning on the roof of the car. He traces his finger down the inside of Draco’s wrist, all the way down to the swell of his knuckles and Draco shivers and moves closer. 

“God,” Harry says, and intertwines their hands. “That fact that I can even - “

Draco laughs, his breath warm against Harry’s skin. The air con whirls above then, white noise and static. “How long did you…” 

The blocks underneath his feet. The cheers of his teammates. Watching Draco arc ahead of him, the curve of his cocky grin. 

“Winter camp three years ago,” he says, and Draco’s face lights up with memory. “I raced you. 50 free.”

“Did you win?” 

Harry snorts. “Of course.”

Draco rolls his eyes. “Oh, like I don’t kick your ass in 400’s.”

“Events over 200’s aren’t real,” Harry retorts. He laughs as Draco hits him, cold fingers pinching into his skin. “No. I think I always - I thought about you too much, even before training camp. But I was on the blocks and I was watching you and you dove in and…I think that’s when I knew.”

Draco hums, a thoughtful noise. He throws his leg on top of Harry’s, heel digging into Harry’s calve. “Worlds. Two years ago. We were on the plane ride home and - everyone was exhausted. But I remembered I still thought you looked…” He gestures vaguely. “You know. How could I have resisted?” 

Harry remembers that ride - the dry air of the plane, the rain that froze to ice on the windows. The team had seats right at the back of the aisle, still in team hoodies and wet hair. He remembers Draco watching him, silent and hesitant, eyes luminous in the dying light. “I remember.”

Draco sucks in a breath. The hum of the fridge cuts off - the silence is deafening now, echoing in Harry’s head. “Did you know?”

Harry bites his lip. He thinks of midnight drives and ferry rides, hotel rooms and pool decks, airports and buses. He thinks of the way Draco always looked at him, the way his entire face lit up, the sobbing calls and empty change rooms and the way his hands would sometimes linger on Harry’s.

“Yeah,” Harry says. “I think I did.” 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Draco whispers. “If you knew I…”

Harry exhales. Draco’s fingers trace intricate patterns on his skin, coils and spirals and stars. “It didn’t seem fair to force you to give up your family for me.”

“Fuck my family,” Draco says. There’s heat in his voice this time, anger clipping the ends of his words. “I would have given them up in a flash.”

“I know,” Harry whispers. Draco’s hair feels like silk between his fingers. “But we were...God, fifteen? Sixteen? To make you give up everything - we were kids. We still are kids, kind of. It may not have worked out and then to make you - for you to give up everything - “ 

“They’re barely even _anything_ \- “ 

“But it wouldn’t have been fair,” Harry finishes. “To force you to give up something for a wish.”

There’s a pause. Draco’s hand brushes against Harry’s ribcage, fingers lining up with the divots in his skin. “What changed?”

Harry laughs. “Nothing. To be honest I feel guilty just kissing - “

“No.” Draco’s voice is flat. “Don’t be.” 

Harry breathes in. Breathes out. Squeezes Draco’s hand, pressed his lips to Draco’s cheek. 

He’s not sure who moves first - they kiss at the same time, Harry’s back braced against the headboard, Draco’s hands on his side. He makes a low, thready noise, the light sliding off them both like water, like waves, like rain. Draco tilts his head back, all shadows and long lines and pale skin, radiant in the darkness, achingly soft under Harry’s hands. 

“Okay,” he says, whispers against Draco’s skin, presses his lips to Draco’s coin and seals his promises in silver. “I won’t.”

~

It ends with the sunrise through the windscreen, the steady movement of the car on the asphalt. Clouds, tinted pink and orange and gold, shadows stretching across the dashboard. Music, the same dreamy synth and low bass. Harry has to admit it’s grown on him. 

He stretches his legs out - the windows are down, the air just cool enough that they don’t bother turning on the air-con. 

“Sprite?” Draco says, and holds the bottle out to Harry. Harry turns to look at him, wraps his fingers around the bottle, brushes his hand against Draco’s.

“Sure.” 

He turns his head, takes his eyes off the road for an instant. Draco’s captured in profile, rosy light sliding off the planes of his jaw, legs folded up and tucked to the side. He looks ethereal, like the dawn personified and it’s almost like the beginning, the limitless excitement of an adventure, the reckless sense of freedom that only came with letting go.

But this time Harry reaches across the dashboard. This time Draco takes his hand, presses his thumb into the divot of Harry’s wrist. This time Harry doesn’t look away when Draco smiles at him. 

“I want you to have this,” he says, and drops something in Harry’s hand. It’s the coin, Harry realizes, the cord a knitted tangle in his palm, the metal dull and stained. He remembers wrapping it around his fingers, tugging Draco in, the cut of the string against his skin. “You never told me exactly what you wished for.”

Draco grins. “You. Who else?” 

The road stretches in front of him. The car swerves slightly - Draco curses, though he’s laughing too. “Jesus. You’ll crash.”

“How could I?” Harry says, and it’s all sunrises and music and the light in Draco’s eyes. “You’re here with me, aren’t you?” 

The hum of the radio. The sound of the wind. The clink of string in the back, sea glass against shells, quarters against plastic. Harry looks up, out through the window, thinks he can just make out the faintest glimpse of Draco’s constellation as it vanished into the sun. 

“Yeah,” Draco says, and he smiles. “I am.” 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading!!


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